Book picks similar to
Light of the Moon by Elizabeth Buchan
fiction
historical-fiction
war
resistance
Hannah's War
Jan Eliasberg - 2020
Groundbreaking physicist Dr. Hannah Weiss is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the 20th century: splitting the atom. She understands that the energy released by her discovery can power entire cities or destroy them. Hannah believes the weapon's creation will secure an end to future wars, but as a Jewish woman living under the harsh rule of the Third Reich, her research is belittled, overlooked, and eventually stolen by her German colleagues. Faced with an impossible choice, Hannah must decide what she is willing to sacrifice in pursuit of science's greatest achievement.
New Mexico, 1945. Returning wounded and battered from the liberation of Paris, Major Jack Delaney arrives in the New Mexican desert with a mission: to catch a spy. Someone in the top-secret nuclear lab at Los Alamos has been leaking encoded equations to Hitler's scientists. Chief among Jack's suspects is the brilliant and mysterious Hannah Weiss, an exiled physicist lending her talent to J. Robert Oppenheimer's mission. All signs point to Hannah as the traitor, but over three days of interrogation that separate her lies from the truth, Jack will realize they have more in common than either one bargained for.
Hannah's War is a thrilling wartime story of loyalty, truth, and the unforeseeable fallout of a single choice.
Wolfpack 351
R. Cameron Cooke - 2019
submarines of Wolfpack 351 are low on fuel, torpedoes, and morale. Their only means of escape is a narrow passage teeming with enemy aircraft, mines, and coastal batteries – and guarded by a menacing Japanese fleet led by a legendary admiral hell-bent on stopping them. Facing the imminent destruction of the entire wolfpack, and with few options remaining, the American admirals in Pearl Harbor turn to an aging submarine, the only boat close enough to help. With time running out, the USS Aeneid – a V-boat from another era – must spring the trapped submarines from their watery prison before they meet their fates under the hull-shattering wrath of the enemy’s depth charges.
When Darkness Comes
John Anthony Miller - 2016
In the sprawling network of catacombs underneath the Left Bank of Paris, they hide thousands of Jewish refugees, giving them new identities and leading them to safety. Together they move forward, outsmarting a ruthless enemy, overcoming obstacles, defying danger, moving farther and faster, almost invincible. Until an innocent bystander notices something amiss and their entire world collapses around them.
The Paris Apartment
Kelly Bowen - 2021
One obscure painting leads her to Gabriel Seymour, a highly respected art restorer with his own mysterious past. Together they attempt to uncover the truths concealed within the apartment’s walls. Paris, 1942: The Germans may occupy the City of Lights, but glamorous Estelle Allard flourishes in a world separate from the hardships of war. Yet when the Nazis come for her friends, Estelle doesn’t hesitate to help those she holds dear, no matter the cost. As she works against the forces intent on destroying her loved ones, she can’t know that her actions will have ramifications for generations to come.Set seventy-five years apart, against a perilous and a prosperous Paris, both Estelle and Lia must unearth hidden courage as they navigate the dangers of a changing world, altering history—and their family’s futures—forever.
Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance
David Boyle - 2017
As the Germans closed in on the Allies, trapping them on the beaches of Dunkirk, it seemed the entire British army would be obliterated. Such a loss would almost certainly force the British to surrender and allow a Nazi invasion of the UK. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay planned a mass evacuation across the English Channel, but with the Germans drawing ever closer and intense air raids from the Luftwaffe, escape seemed all but impossible. But with a combination of excellent planning, luck, and an almost inconceivable bit of help from none other than Adolf Hitler himself, Operation Dynamo was underway. Over 900 boats sailed to Dunkirk - including destroyers, ferries, fishing boats and the famous “little boats of Dunkirk” – and, across nine tense days, rescued 338,226 soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk in what remains the biggest evacuation in military history. This brilliantly researched book by historian David Boyle recounts each fraught day of the famous rescue mission that Winston Churchill famously called a ‘miracle of deliverance’. Praise for David Boyle 'A wonderfully elegant and pithy reappraisal of the “miracle” that saved Britain' Saul David ‘Exhilarating’ - Daily Mail David Boyle is a British author and journalist who writes mainly about history and new ideas in economics, money, business and culture. He lives in Crystal Palace, London. His books include ‘Unheard Unseen: Warfare in the Dardanelles’, ‘Towards the Setting Sun: The Race for America’ and ‘The Age to Come’.
We That Are Left
Lisa Bigelow - 2017
Melbourne, 1941. Headstrong young Mae meets and falls head over heels in love with Harry Parker, a dashing naval engineer. After a whirlwind courtship they marry and Mae is heavily pregnant when she hears that Harry has just received his dream posting to HMAS Sydney. Just after Mae becomes a mother, she learns Harry's ship is missing.Meanwhile, Grace Fowler is battling prejudice to become a reporter on the afternoon daily newspaper, The Tribune, while waiting for word on whether her journalist boyfriend Phil Taylor, captured during the fall of Singapore, is still alive.Surrounded by their friends and families, Mae and Grace struggle to keep hope alive in the face of hardship and despair. Then Mae's neighbour and Grace's boss Sam Barton tells Mae about a rumour that the Japanese have towed the damaged ship to Singapore and taken the crew prisoner. Mae's life is changed forever as she focuses her efforts on willing her husband home.Set in inner Melbourne and rural Victoria, We That Are Left is a moving and haunting novel about love and war, the terrifyingly thin line between happiness and tragedy, and how servicemen and women are not the only lives lost when tragedy strikes during war.
The Last Bookshop in London: A Novel of World War II
Madeline Martin - 2021
Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and blackout curtains that she finds on her arrival were not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she’d wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London.Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed—a force that triumphs over even the darkest nights of the war.
Girl at the Edge of Sky
Lilian Nattel - 2019
From the bestselling author of
Web of Angels
and
The River Midnight
.
Lily Litvyak is no one's idea of a fighter pilot: a tiny, dimpled teenager with golden curls who lied about her age in order to fly. But in the crucible of the air war against the German invaders, she becomes that rare thing--a flying ace, glorified at home and around the world as the White Lily of Stalingrad. The real Lily disappeared in combat in August 1943, and the facts of her life are slim, but they have inspired Lilian Nattel's indelible portrait of a courageous young woman driven by family secrets to become an unlikely war hero. Even more powerfully, Nattel takes another big leap, asking the compelling question: what if Lily survived that last crash and became a prisoner of the Germans? Lily lives in a world of horrifying risk, where the life and death stakes are high in the air, but also on the ground. In the Soviet system, everyone is an informer, even your best friend. Lily lives in constant fear that she will be found out, arrested and executed as the daughter of an "enemy of the people." When she ends up a German prisoner, as a Soviet officer and a Jew, the need for deception becomes even more desperate. Girl at the Edge of Sky is a masterwork of the imagination, subtle and bold all at once, bringing us deep into the precarious life of a remarkable woman who lies to fight for the country that would disown her, and then lies to survive the enemy that would annihilate her.
A Town Like Alice
Nevil Shute - 1950
A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. Jean's travels leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her war-time ordeals.
Sarah's Key
Tatiana de Rosnay - 2006
but before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France's past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it. In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel' d'Hiv' to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.Writing about the fate of her country with a pitiless clarity, Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and denial surrounding this painful episode in French history.(front flap)
The Postmistress
Sarah Blake - 2009
CDs, 9 CDs, 11 hoursWhat would happen if someone did the unthinkable-and didn't deliver a letter? Filled with stunning parallels to today, The Postmistress is a sweeping novel about the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women-and of two countries torn apart by war.
The Illusion of Separateness
Simon Van Booy - 2013
The same world moves beneath each of them, and one by one, through seemingly random acts of selflessness, they discover the vital parts they have played in each other's lives, a realization that shatters the illusion of their separateness. Moving back and forth in time and across continents, The Illusion of Separateness displays the breathtaking skill of, "a truly special writer who does things with abstract language that is so evocative and original your breath literally catches in your chest" (Andre Dubus III).
The Women in the Castle
Jessica Shattuck - 2017
The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war. As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges. Written with the devastating emotional power of The Nightingale, Sarah’s Key, and The Light Between Oceans, Jessica Shattuck’s evocative and utterly enthralling novel offers a fresh perspective on one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Combining piercing social insight and vivid historical atmosphere, The Women in the Castle is a dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake of unimaginable hardship.
Behind the Fireplace: Memoirs of a girl working in the Dutch Resistance
Andrew Scott - 2016
The youngest daughter, Kieks, joined the Resistance, delivering illegal newspapers, guiding British parachutists around The Hague and preparing safe houses for Special Forces who were dropped in from England. As the War continued, she fell in love with a Resistance commander, and worked with him to rescue wounded colleagues, steal weapons from German arms dumps and move weapons around the country. They had a tumultuous parting and she continued her work, acting as a courier with a two hundred km bike ride to the north of Holland. When she returned home, she appreciated how much the war had changed her and her boyfriend, and prepared to try a reconciliation.She escaped a firing squad four times, and survived the war, mentally scarred by her experiences. She sought help, but the help she was offered came in a poisoned chalice, and she kept her secret to herself for almost fifty years.Her family in Holland was recognised by Yad Vashem, the Israeli organisation that records those who saved Jews from the Holocaust, and she was awarded a pension for her work in the Resistance by the Dutch foundation Stichting 1940-1945. It was only when these organisations acknowledged the truth of her claims that she had the confidence to tell her family of the events from long ago.
In the Light of Morning
Tim Pears - 2014
High above the mountains of occupied Slovenia an aeroplane drops three British parachutists – brash MP Major Jack Farwell, radio operator Sid Dixon, and young academic Lieutenant Tom Freedman – sent to assist the resistance in their battle against the Axis forces.Greeted upon arrival by a rag-tag group of Partisans, the men are led off into the countryside. It is early summer, and the mountains and forests teem with life and colour. Despite the distant crackle of gunfire, the war feels a long way off for Tom. The Partisans, too, are not what he was expecting – courageous, kind, and alluring, especially Jovan, their commander, and the hauntingly beautiful Marija. Yet after a series of daring encounters, the enemy’s net begins to tighten. They find evidence of massacres, of a dark and terrible band of men pursuing them through the wilderness. As the Partisans stumble their way towards a final, tragic battle, so the relationships within the group begin to fray, with Tom finding himself forced to face up to his deepest, most secret desires.