Book picks similar to
And All The King's Men by Gordon Stevens


historical
fiction
historical-fiction
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Sea of Wolves


Philip K. Allan - 2020
    Across the stormy North Atlantic battle rages between wolfpacks of U-boats and escort ships fighting to protect the Allies’ vital convoys. Meanwhile teams of codebreakers at Bletchley Park struggle to penetrate the German Navy’s Top-Secret Dolphin code, and unlock the flow of vital intelligence that will swing the battle in the Allies favour.Sea of Wolves plots the lives of three people caught up in the centre of the battle. Vera Baldwin, a young crossword-enthusiast, lifted from her quiet suburban life and thrown into the middle of the greatest codebreaking effort the world has seen. Otto Stuckmann, the rookie commander of U70, a German naval veteran struggling with the ceaseless demands being placed on him. Leonard Cole, the newly appointed first lieutenant of HMS Protea and a man with unfinished business to resolve.Each is unknown to the others as their fates spiral around each other, touching and twisting towards a final encounter that will change their lives forever.

A Brief History of Montmaray


Michelle Cooper - 2008
    When she receives a journal for her sixteenth birthday, Sophie decides to chronicle day-to-day life on the island. But this is 1936, and the news that trickles in from the mainland reveals a world on the brink of war. The politics of Europe seem far away from their remote island—until two German officers land a boat on Montmaray. And then suddenly politics become very personal indeed.

Bitter Seeds


Ian Tregillis - 2010
    The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in betweenRaybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities--a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present--Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.Alan Furst meets Alan Moore in the opening of an epic of supernatural alternate history, the tale of a twentieth century like ours and also profoundly different.

Resistance


Owen Sheers - 2007
    A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege.1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German counterattack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied. The seat of British government has fled to Worcester, Churchill to Canada. A network of British resistance cells is all that is left to defy the German army.Against this backdrop, Resistance opens with Sarah Lewis, a twenty-six-year-old farmer's wife, waking to find her husband, Tom, has disappeared. She is not alone, as all the other women in the Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence, the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and wait, hoping for news.Later, a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups together, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of the patrol. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened. Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers's debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of grace and power.

The Boys from Brazil


Ira Levin - 1976
    Josef Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project—the creation of the Fourth Reich. Barry Kohler, a young investigative journalist, gets wind of the project and informs famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman, but before he can relay the evidence, Kohler is killed. Thus Ira Levin opens one of the strangest and most masterful novels of his career. Why has Mengele marked a number of harmless aging men for murder? What is the hidden link that binds them? What interest can they possibly hold for their killers: six former SS men dispatched from South America by the most wanted Nazi still alive, the notorious "Angel of Death"? One man alone must answer these questions and stop the killings—Lieberman, himself aging and thought by some to be losing his grip on reality. At the heart of The Boys from Brazil lies a frightening contemporary nightmare, chilling and all too possible.

The Darkest Hour


Tony Schumacher - 2014
    Griffin and Philip Kerr, set in German-occupied London at the close of World War II, a hardened, dispirited British detective jeopardizes his own life to save someone else and achieve the impossible—some kind of redemption.London, 1946. The Nazis have won the war and now occupy Great Britain, using brutality and fear to control its citizens. They even use it to control those who work for them. John Henry Rossett, a decorated British war hero and former police sergeant, is one of those unlucky souls. He’s a man accustomed to obeying commands, but he’s now assigned a job he didn’t ask for and knows he cannot refuse: rounding up Jews for deportation, including men and women he’s known his whole life. Robbed of his family by a resistance bomb, and robbed of his humanity by the work he is forced to do, fate suddenly presents Rossett with an unexpected challenge that could change everything. He finds a boy hiding in an abandoned building and is faced with a momentous decision—to do something or to look the other way—yet whatever Rossett does, he will be pushed into a place where he could endanger all he holds dear.  Played out against a city in ruin, a place divided between the conquered and the conquerors, The Darkest Hour is a tense, driving adventure thriller, a fascinating alternate history, and the unforgettable story of a man who will be broken—or given a completely new lease on life.

HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour


Nicholas Monsarrat - 1972
    Marlborough Will Enter Harbour, an old sloop, homeward bound, is torpedoed, leaving her guns out of action, more than three-quarters of her crew dead, and radio contact impossible. But her valiant captain steadfastly refuses to surrender his ship... In Leave Cancelled, an army officer and his young wife concentrate their passionate love into twenty-four hours, knowing that it might be their last chance... And in Heavy Rescue, an old soldier, having lived on the scrap heap for more than twenty years, finds that gallantry is once again in demand when he becomes leader of a Heavy Rescue Squad...

Amerika


Paul Lally - 2015
     Washington D.C. and Manhattan disappear beneath nuclear mushroom clouds. Stripped of its congress, judicial and executive branches, the United States is a fractured, frantic shell of its former self; each state, a world unto its own. Germany’s threat of further attacks on major American cities like Chicago, Miami and Pittsburgh compels Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, sole survivor of the executive branch and now president, to bend to Hitler’s demand of neutrality. Powerless and impotent, America watches from the sidelines while Europe and Asia go up in flames. In search of a cause to unite America once again as a nation, the “Sons of Liberty,” a distant echo of our nation’s revolutionary war volunteers, secretly band together again, in the South this time, led by take-no-prisoners, General George S. Patton himself. And in doing so, he calls upon a group of ordinary citizens, including ex-Pan Am pilot Sam Carter and Hollywood actress Ava James, to embark on a series of missions that, if successful, will deliver America from its darkest hour and set it on a path toward the bright light of victory. The odds are impossible, the missions dangerous, and with an unknown spy in their midst threatening to wreck their intricate plans, everything seems doomed from the start as they struggle to bring America back into the fight for liberty and justice for all.

Famous Last Words


Timothy Findley - 1981
    Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament - the sordid truth that he alone possessed. Fascinated but horrified, they learn of a dazzling array of characters caught up in a scandal and political corruption.Famous Last Words is part-thriller, part-horror story; it is also a meditation on history and the human soul and it is Findley's fine achievement that he has combined these elements into a web that constantly surprises and astounds the reader.

The Wolf's Hour


Robert R. McCammon - 1989
    Able to change shape with lightning speed, to kill silently or with savage, snarling fury, he proved his talents against Rommel in Africa. Now he faces his most delicate, dangerous mission: to unravel the secret Nazi plan known as Iron Fist. From a parachute jump into occupied France to the lush corruption of Berlin, from the arms of a beautiful spy to the cold embrace of a madman's death machine, Gallatin draws ever closer to the ghastly truth about Iron Fist. But with only hours to D-Day, he is trapped in the Nazis' web of destruction....

Bluebirds: A Battle of Britain Novel


Melvyn Fickling - 2018
    Bluebirds, a novel based on true stories, climaxes in 1940, the world's most dangerous year. A meticulously researched Battle of Britain novel based on the true stories of an East Anglian war hero and the first American volunteer to fire guns against the Nazis, a man who became his friend and brother-in-arms. The Battle of Britain defined the future for Britain, Europe and America. Bluebirds tells the story of four ordinary young men who are thrown together as Hitler plunges the European continent into its darkest hours. Andrew Francis and Gerry Donaldson were born on different sides of the Atlantic just before The Great War. Together with the mildly psychotic Bryan Hale, they fly Spitfires through the summer of 1940. Invasion is imminent and England faces almost certain defeat after Hitler’s unstoppable armies slice through France to the Channel coast. Fighter Command risks total destruction as they rise to meet the Fuhrer’s Luftwaffe hordes in what would become The Battle of Britain. Flying with The Few - Review in FlyPast Magazine October 2017 The first part of a proposed trilogy, Bluebirds stands alone as a gripping fictionalised account of The Battle of Britain, documenting how the lives of its four central characters become intertwined. This has clearly been a labour of love for author Melvyn Fickling, who writes with great clarity about the fast-moving events of that pivotal summer, and who imbues his descriptions of flight with boundless enthusiasm. Structured in time-linear format, Melvyn adheres closely to history, creating an increasingly tense atmosphere that becomes all too tragic when the cost of war is realised. The story follows the path of four pilots, starting with the formative years of three of them, and working its way forward, documenting the fears of war in Europe, and how the threat influences the decisions of all. Andrew Francis joins the pre-war RAF - idealistic and well-mannered, he is somewhat shocked at the fiery antics of fellow pilot Bryan Hale, with whom he nevertheless becomes friends. When war erupts, they are joined at Kenley by American pilot Gerry Donaldson, a volunteer facing pressure from British authorities to document his experiences - a propaganda bid to involve the US more closely in the conflict. Eventually Vincent Drew comes under their wing. Troubled by years of childhood abuse and hiding a serious health condition, with Vincent comes tragedy. In an excellent narrative, the author captures the mood of the times - the fear of invasion, the differing attitudes to the enemy, and the carry-on-regardless spirit that kept Britain in the war. FlyPast Magazine - At the heart of aviation heritage.

HMS Ulysses


Alistair MacLean - 1955
    Now reissued in a new cover style.The story of men who rose to heroism, and then to something greater, HMS Ulysses takes its place alongside The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea as one of the classic novels of the navy at war.It is the compelling story of Convoy FR77 to Murmansk – a voyage that pushes men to the limits of human endurance, crippled by enemy attack and the bitter cold of the Arctic.

The Eagle Has Landed


Jack Higgins - 1975
    The mission, ordered by Hitler himself and planned by Heinrich Himmler, is led by ace agent Kurt Steiner and aided on the ground by IRA gunman Liam Devlin.As the deadly duo executes Hitler’s harrowing plot, only the quiet town of Studley Constable stands in their way. Its residents are the lone souls aware of the impending Nazi plan, and they must become the most unlikely of heroes as the fate of the war hangs in the balance.

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: River God / The Seventh Scroll / Warlock


Wilbur Smith - 2003
    

The Good Shepherd


C.S. Forester - 1955
    A convoy of thirty-seven merchant ships is ploughing through icy, submarine-infested North Atlantic seas during the most critical days of World War II, when the German submarines had the upper hand and Allied shipping was suffering heavy losses. In charge is Commander George Krause, an untested veteran of the U.S. Navy. Hounded by a wolf pack of German U-boats, he faces 48 hours of desperate peril trapped on the bridge of the ship. Exhausted beyond measure, he must make countless and terrible decisions as he leads his small fighting force against the relentless U-boats.