Book picks similar to
Helen by Anita Mishook


historical-fiction
fiction
history
literary-fiction

The Gravedigger's Daughter


Joyce Carol Oates - 2007
    Here the father—a former high school teacher—is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. When local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty give rise to an unthinkable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca heads out into America. Embarking upon an extraordinary odyssey of erotic risk and ingenious self-invention, she seeks renewal, redemption, and peace—on the road to a bittersweet and distinctly “American” triumph.

A Still Small Voice


John Reed - 2000
    There, Alma will have as friends, neighbors, and benefactors the magnificent Cleveland family.With their sprawling mansion and gleaming thoroughbred horses, the Clevelands are a wonder. But from the beginning, one Cleveland draws all of Alma's attention: the youngest son, John Warren.Alma knew they were meant for each other from their first meeting. But everything changes as war descends on Cotterpin Creek, taking John Warren to battle and sweeping his family into the chaos.Against this turbulent backdrop, Alma will come of age. And when the fighting is over, the story of a brave young man riding off to battle becomes a haunting journey of vengeance and redemption. And for Alma, yet another journey begins on the day a tormented young soldier staggers back into her life.

Heart Mountain


Gretel Ehrlich - 1988
    Ehrlich explores the twin solitudes of political exile and geographic isolation in this powerful novel—the story of Japanese Americans forced into a relocation camp—set in Wyoming during World War II.

Cry of the Heart: A World War II Novel


Martin Lake - 2019
    Another woman took him in, at risk to herself. Viviane Renaud is a young mother living on the French Riviera in the Second World War. Times are hard but she is not the sort to be dismayed by circumstances. One day her life changes forever. A young Jewish woman, fleeing from the authorities, begs her to take care of her four year old boy, David. Almost without thinking, Viviane agrees. Viviane’s life is never the same again. She fabricates a story to explain how David came to be with her and must tip-toe around the suspicions of her neighbours, her friends and most of all her mother and sister. She and her husband, Alain, find allies in unlikely places, particularly an American woman, Dorothy Pine. But then, the world crashes around them. Threatened by Allied military success, Hitler sends the German army to occupy the south of France. With them come the SS and the Gestapo. The peril for Jews and for those, like Viviane, who hide them, appears overwhelming. The challenge for them now is to survive.

The Year After


Martin Davies - 2011
    At Hannesford Court, it's almost as if nothing has changed.But beneath the surface, nothing is quite the same as the last time they met there. A few faces are missing, and for Tom Allen, only just out of uniform, the desirable daughter of the house suddenly seems within his reach.Then there is the story of the young woman who was found drowned in the swirling waters of the River Hann while Tom was away. Can one unexplained death be significant when so many millions have died in the trenches?

Never So Few: A Novel


Tom T. Chamales - 1957
    American soldiers and native Kachin troops battle Japanese forces behind enemy lines in the Burmese jungles. But during the brutal campaign to gain territory in the unforgiving tropical landscape, Captain Reynolds and his band of special operations soldiers and guerrilla fighters struggle to find self-awareness, and even love, in the midst of the trials of combat.   One of the youngest officers to serve in Merrill’s Marauders and OSS Detachment 101—precursors to the Green Berets and Central Intelligence Agency—author Tom T. Chamales brings an unparalleled level of authentic detail and raw intensity to this work of fiction based on his real-life experience in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Never So Few is “an extraordinary and powerful book,” unflinching in its portrayal of wartime sacrifice and violence (Kirkus Reviews, starred).   The basis for the movie starring Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen, it offers “dramatic, exciting, and concretely detailed accounts of battle action,” and joins the ranks of other classic war novels such as From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead in bringing later generations to the frontlines and into the inner lives of the brave men who served (The New York Times).

The Moment Before Drowning


James Brydon - 2018
    Captain Jacques le Garrec, a former detective and French Resistance hero, returns to France in disgrace, traumatized after two years of working in the army intelligence services, and accused of a brutal crime.As le Garrec awaits trial in the tiny Breton town where he grew up, he is asked to look into a disturbing and unsolved murder committed the previous winter. A local teenage girl was killed and her bizarrely mutilated body was left on display on the heathland in a way that no one could understand.Le Garrec’s investigations draw him into the dark past of the town, still haunted by memories of the German Occupation. As he tries to reconstruct the events of the girl’s murder, the violence and guilt intertwine with his own recollections of Algeria and threaten to submerge him.

All Whom I Have Loved


Aharon Appelfeld - 1999
    Initially, Paul lives with his mother–a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, who he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying the gentile André. He is then sent to live with his father–once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for stability and meaning in a world that is collapsing around him, but his love for the earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the strange pull he feels towards the Jews praying in the synagogue near his home, and the fascination with which he observes Eastern Orthodox church rituals merely give him tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part.The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness–his mother, deserted by her new husband and dying of typhus; his father, gunned down while trying to stop the robbery of a Jewish-owned shop–and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938 are rendered with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.

The Kaminsky Cure


Christopher New - 2005
    The matriarch, Gabi, was born Jewish but converted to Christianity in her teens. The patriarch, Willibald, is a Lutheran minister who, on one hand is an admirer of Hitler, but on the other hand, the conflicted father of children who are half-Jewish. Mindful and resentful of her husband’s ambivalence, Gabi is determined to make sure her children are educated, devising schemes to keep them in school even after learning that any child less than 100% Aryan will eventually be kept from completing education. She even hires tutors who are willing to teach half-Jewish children and in this way comes to hire Fraulein Kaminsky who shows Gabi how to cure her frustration and rage: to keep her mouth filled with water until the urge to scream or rant has passed.This beautifully rendered novel of WWII, “seen through a child’s eye, makes delusion and hypocrisy shockingly stark.” (The Guardian)

City on Fire


Garth Risk Hallberg - 2015
    Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown's punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter, Richard, and his idealistic neighbor, Jenny, - and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year's Eve.The mystery, as it reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power, will open up even the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives with be changed forever.City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock 'n' roll, about what people need from each other in order to live... and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place.

Without Warning


Thomas C. Sanger - 2017
    It had become a silhouette barely distinguishable against the darkening twilight sky, but Lemp was close enough to see the foaming white wave thrown up by its bow. He smiled when the spray arched higher, signaling the ship had begun changing course again.“You’re right on schedule,” he said to the image in his eyepiece.Lemp’s pulse quickened with the knowledge that his war was about to begin . . .On September 1, 1939, the passenger liner Athenia set sail from Glasgow for Montreal by way of Belfast and Liverpool. She carried 1,100 passengers, nearly three-quarters of whom were women and children. On September 3, Athenia was torpedoed by a German submarine. In Without Warning, author Thomas C. Sanger tells the harrowing story of the sinking of the Athenia from the perspective of eight people: six passengers, Athenia’s chief officer, and the commander of the German U-boat.Based on accounts written by passengers, personal interviews with survivors and descendants of survivors, books, newspaper stories, and original documents, Without Warning honors the memory of Athenia’s passengers, both living and dead.

The Boy Who Went Away


Eli Gottlieb - 1997
    While engaging in his favorite domestic spying game, Denny unwittingly discovers the desperate measures his mother will take to save his autistic older brother, Fad, who is lost in the diagnostic Dark Ages of the 1960s. At the heart of this novel is not only the story of Denny's coltish entrance to adolescence, but also that of his relationship with Fad, which will be forever changed during the course of that summer at 44 Drainer Drive. This is the cruelly antic, heartrending story of two childhoods that would, by fall's arrival, be irretrievably lost.

Heart of Deception


M.L. Malcolm - 2011
    Malcolm is the riveting sequel to the author’s critically acclaimed Heart of Lies. Based in part on her family’s actual history, Heart of Deception tells the intensely exciting story of a desperate Hungarian national who becomes an international spy in order to protect his loved ones during World War Two and beyond. A tale of espionage and intrigue, duty and destiny, it is an extraordinary saga that offers a richly evocative portrayal of a remarkable twentieth-century epoch while delivering the page-turning historical suspense of James Clavell, Susan Howatch, and Ken Follett.

Wings: A Novel of World War II Flygirls


Karl Friedrich - 2011
    Sally Ketchum has little chance of bettering her life until a mysterious barnstormer named Tex teaches her to fly and to dare to love. But when Tex dies in a freak accident, Sally must make her own way in the world. She enrolls in the U.S. military’s Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program at a special school known as Avenger, where she learns to fly the biggest, fastest, meanest planes. She also reluctantly becomes involved with Beau Bayard, a flight instructor and aspiring writer who seems to offer her everything she could want. Despite her obvious mastery of flying, many members of the military are unable to accept that a “skirt” has any place in a cockpit. Soon Sally finds herself struggling against a high-powered Washington lawyer that wants to close down Avenger once and for all.

In Alexa's Shoes


Rochelle Alexandra - 2019
    Loaded onto cattle trucks, they are transported to an unknown destination. Terror and uncertainty become the new normal. Life is a continuous nightmare as she is selected by a Gestapo officer’s wife, destined to become little more than their slave.Separated from everyone she loves Alexa relies on her Christian faith, inner strength and courage, to endure through her long nightmare. Her story takes her on a treacherous journey across war-ravaged Europe in search of her family and the life she once knew. Despite living through unimaginable hardships and life-threatening danger, Alexa feels that someone, or something, seems to be looking out for her. Years later, she finds out that not all was as it seemed, as hidden secrets from this dark period in history are revealed to her.In Alexa’s Shoes is a historical novel that beckons the reader to follow in the footsteps of a real-life individual who walks by faith to triumph over tragedy, one step at a time. It is based on the true story of the author’s grandmother.