Book picks similar to
The White Pearl by Kate Furnivall
historical-fiction
fiction
asia
historical
V2: A Novel of World War II
Robert Harris - 2020
Kay Connolly, once an actress, now a young English Intelligence officer, ships out for Belgium to locate the launch sites and neutralize the threat. But when rumors of a defector circulate through the German ranks, Graf becomes a suspect. Unknown to each other, Graf and Connolly find themselves on opposite sides of the hunt for the saboteur. Their twin stories play out against the background of the German missile campaign, one of the most epic and modern but least explored episodes of the Second World War. Their destinies are on a collision course.
The Sparsholt Affair
Alan Hollinghurst - 2017
Handsome, charismatic, a powerful athlete and oarsman, David Sparsholt seems at first unaware of the effect he has on others--especially on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist, himself also destined to become a writer. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove from the action: a place of transience and uncertainty, the fears and rigors of the blackout both encouraging and concealing unexpected liaisons. Between these two young men of very different backgrounds an unusual friendship develops, one whose consequences will unfold over the many years that follow.Alan Hollinghurst's masterly new novel evokes the intimate lives of three generations of Sparsholts in a sequence of vividly rendered episodes: a childhood holiday in Cornwall; eccentric social gatherings at the Dax family home; the adventures of David's son Johnny, in pursuit of love and a career as a painter in 1970s London. Changes in taste, morality, and private life are explored in a group portrait of friends brought together by art, literature, and love. Champions of the Modern live to see modernity itself becoming history, while more personal, life-changing crises and scandals--including that which gives this novel its title--recede into the past, leaving their ambiguous traces. And as gay men and women live in increasing freedom and openness, and the gay scene evolves into new forms and possibilities, The Sparsholt Affair becomes a meditation on human transience, even as it expresses the countervailing longing for permanence and continuity.Witty, tender, epic in scope yet rich in observation, The Sparsholt Affair is a dazzling new work of fiction by a writer justly hailed by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the best novelists at work today."
The Last Letter from Juliet
Melanie Hudson - 2019
Every nook of her Cornish cottage is alive with memories just waiting to be discovered.Katherine Henderson has escaped to Cornwall for Christmas, but she soon finds there is more to her holiday cottage than meets the eye. And on the eve of Juliet’s 100th birthday, Katherine is enlisted to make an old lady’s final Christmas wish come true…
The Lieutenant's Nurse
Sara Ackerman - 2019
She’s never even seen the ocean before, but Eva Cassidy has her reasons for making the crossing to Hawaii, and they run a lot deeper than escaping a harsh Michigan winter. Newly enlisted as an Army Corps nurse, Eva is stunned by the splendor she experiences aboard the steamship SS Lurline; even more so by Lt. Clark Spencer, a man she is drawn to but who clearly has secrets of his own. But Eva’s past—and the future she’s trying to create—means that she’s not free to follow her heart. Clark is a navy intelligence officer, and he warns her that the United States won’t be able to hold off joining the war for long, but nothing can prepare them for the surprise attack that will change the world they know.In the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Eva and her fellow nurses band together for the immense duty of keeping the American wounded alive. And the danger that finds Eva threatens everything she holds dear. Amid the chaos and heartbreak, Eva will have to decide whom to trust and how far she will go to protect those she loves.Set in the vibrant tropical surroundings of the Pacific, The Lieutenant’s Nurse is an evocative, emotional WWII story of love, friendship and the resilient spirit of the heroic nurses of Pearl Harbor.
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
G.B. Edwards - 1981
Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.
The Book of Aron
Jim Shepard - 2015
He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape — as his mentor suspected he could — to spread word about the atrocities? Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child's-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron's voice will remember it forever.
Elephant Moon
John Sweeney - 2012
But the human legacy of the British Empire will be left behind in the shape of sixty-two Anglo-Burmese children, born to local women after affairs with foreign men. Half-castes, they are not acknowledged by either side and they are to be abandoned with no one to protect them. Their teacher, Grace Collins, a young Englishwoman, refuses to join the European evacuation and instead sets out to deliver the orphans to the safety of India. She faces impossible odds because between her and India lie one thousand miles of jungle, mountains, rivers and the constant, unseen threat of the Japanese. With Japanese soldiers chasing them down, the groups chances of survival shrink - until they come across a herd of fifty-three elephants who, with their awesome strength and kindness, quickly become the orphans only hope of survival. Based on a true story, Elephant Moon is an unforgettable epic tale of courage and compassion in the midst of brutality and destruction.