18 books like King Rat
The Tenth Man
In a prison in occupied France one in every ten men is to be shot. The prisoners draw lots among themselves - and for rich lawyer Louis Chavel, it seems that his whole life has been leading up to an agonizing and crucial failure of nerve.
Shares: Prisoners and prisons, Prisoners of war, World War II
Andersonville; a story of rebel military prisons
"McElroy, with a detachment of his regiment, was guarding a supply route to Cumberland Gap when his entire company was captured in a surprise attack one morning during the winter of 1862-63. He and his comrades were taken to Lippy Prison, and from there they were sent to Andersonville. McElroy spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. His story of attempts at escape, of comrades tracked through…
Shares: Prisoners and prisons, Prisoners of war, Soldiers
Se questo è un uomo
This book describes Primo Levi's experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camp alive. The average life expectancy of a new entry was three months. This truly amazing…
Shares: Prisoners and prisons, Prisoners of war, World War II
Israel Potter
Melville's eighth book was begun as a simple rewrite of an obscure little narrative entitled Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, in which Israel tells the story of his sad fall from Revolutionary hero to London peddler. Following its opening chapter Melville's novel retells that tale, with close adherence to the language and events of the Life, and then, shaking free of the…
Shares: Prisoners and prisons, Historical Fiction
The Summer of My German Soldier
When her small hometown in Arkansas becomes the site of a camp housing German prisoners during World War II, 12-year-old Patty Bergen learns what it means to open her heart. Although she's Jewish, she begins to see a prison escapee, Anton, not as a Nazi--but as a lonely, frightened young man with feelings not unlike her own, who understands and appreciates her in a way her parents never will. And…
Shares: Prisoners of war, World War II, Historical Fiction
Gravity's Rainbow
Winner of the National Book Award"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." —The New Republic“A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds…
Shares: Soldiers, World War II
The Winds of War
Follows the various members of the Henry family as they become involved in the events preceeding America's involvement in World War II.
Like no other masterpiece of historical fiction, Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II is the great novel of America's Greatest Generation.
Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events, as well as all the drama, romance, heroism, and…
Shares: War stories, World War II, Historical Fiction
Three came home
"Three Came Home" tells of the author's time in Japanese POW and civilian internee camps in North Borneo and Sarawak, and was made into a film of the same
name in 1950. It describes Keith's life in North Borneo in the period immediately before the Japanese invasion in 1942, and her subsequent internment and
suffering, separated from her husband Harry, and with a young son to care for. Keith was…
Shares: Prisoners of war, World War II
Works (La tregua / Se questo è un uomo)
The author's survival in Auschwitz and his travels through Eastern Europe and Russia are the subjects of this memoir.
Shares: Prisoners of war, World War II
From Here to Eternity
Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt…
Shares: Soldiers, World War II, Historical Fiction
Whirlwind
Tehran, Iran 1979: Simmering religious tensions finally explode, and the Iranian people rise up against the Shah. The country, once secular, is now thrown back into an orthodoxy that threatens to tear it apart. The United States and Russia go on high alert, with warships heading to the Middle East. The region becomes a powder keg, waiting to explode. Caught up in the revolution are a British…
Shares: War stories, Historical Fiction
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife.
Taking its title from one of the most famous books in Japanese literature, written by the great haiku poet Basho, Flanagan’s novel has as its heart one of the most infamous episodes of Japanese history, the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II.
In…
Shares: Prisoners of war, World War II
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
De dochter van een Griekse dokter wordt tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog gescheiden van haar geliefde, een kapitein in het Italiaanse leger.
Shares: War stories, World War II, Historical Fiction
War and remembrance
From the Middle East, to Moscow, to Hitler's death camps, the members of the Henry family face grave danger as they fight in the Second World War.
Shares: War stories, World War II, Historical Fiction
The English Patient
With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of…
Shares: War stories, World War II, Historical Fiction
The Nightingale
Despite their differences, sisters Vianne and Isabelle have always been close. Younger, bolder Isabelle lives in Paris while Vianne is content with life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter. But when the Second World War strikes, Antoine is sent off to fight and Vianne finds herself isolated so Isabelle is sent by their father to help her.
As the war progresses,…
Shares: War stories, World War II, Historical Fiction
The cloud atlas
Set against the magnificent backdrop of Alaska in the waning days of World War II, The Cloud Atlas is an enthralling debut novel, a story of adventure and awakening--and of a young soldier who came to Alaska on an extraordinary, top-secret mission...and found a world that would haunt him forever.Drifting through the night, whisper-quiet, they were the most sublime manifestations of a desperate…
Shares: War stories, World War II
The dark forest
John Durward and John Trenchard are two Englishmen who join a company of Russian doctors, nurses, and orderlies working on the Russian side of the Eastern Front at the height of World War I. Durward, the primary narrator, is a detached and seemingly-objective observer of events; his friend Trenchard is a dreamy, clumsy, and naive man whose fiancee, Marie Ivanova, is serving alongside him as a…
Shares: War stories, Historical Fiction