I've just seen the Netflix series All The Light We Cannot See, based on the novel by Anthony Doerr which is sitting on my bookcase. It has tempted me to read and/or reread some novels based in WWII.
Does anyone have any recommendations of novels based historically in or around WWII?
@chestas@bookstodon There are so many WWII novels, it can be overwhelming. The most impactful for me have been:
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, Sonia Purnell [Incredible true story (narrative nonfiction) of Virginia Hall, an extraordinary figure most of us have never heard of.]
The Complete Maus, Art Spiegelman (deeply affecting)
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
The Librarian of Auschwitz, Salva Rubio (novel or graphic version)
@chestas@bookstodon historical fiction: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, about a young girl who gets caught up in the French resistance, it’s beautiful, poignant, desolate and inspiring all at once.
Scifi: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. Inception meets catch-22 meets starship troopers. A real head fuck with a mind bending plot and an over generous dollop of gore.
Factual: Moonless Night by Jimmy James; the true tale of a serial ww2 prison camp escaper, whose story just gets more and more incredible.
@chestas@bookstodon Operation Mincemeat (the book, haven’t seen the Netflix adaptation), the monuments men (the book although the men who stare at goats movie was not bad), the women who flew for hitler, code girls, And the walls came tumbling down by Jack Fishman about the Mosquito bombing raid on Amiens prison in Nazi occupied France.
@mvilain@chestas@bookstodon I'll second this, and also propose that if you end up liking Declare, you should dig into his other books, even if you aren't particularly interested in the eras in which they're set.
"Jeder stirbt für sich allein" is published in English as "Alone in Berlin" or "Everyone Dies Alone." It's Hans Fallada's fictionalised account of the Otto and Elise Hampel affair, and describes the reality of living under a totalitarian regime.
@chestas@misterprickles@bookstodon There is a great film version with Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson. I'd recommend The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg and Interrogating Ellie by Julian Grey. Both are about British women - from very different social backgrounds - married to Germans/Austrians and surviving the war as aliens.
@chestas@misterprickles@bookstodon Oh, there's also Der Reisende (The Passenger in English) which the author wrote in the weeks following Kristallnacht. He himself had already fled Germany. It's a tense and nerve-wracking account of a Jewish businessman trying to keep under Nazi radar by travelling on trains. The author's real-life story is also pretty grim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passenger_(Boschwitz_novel)
Similarly Slaughter House 5 (So it Goes), I should include Gravity's Rainbow even though I still need to finish it; Lawrence Durrell, the Alexandria Quartet, the Avignon Quintet; Herman Wouk's The Winds of War;but primarily Vasily Grossman Life and Fate, and Stalingrad.
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