18 books like The Summer of My German Soldier
Andy Grant's pluck
This is the story of a hardworking young man determined to make the best of his opportunities. Andy is forced to drop out of Penhurst Academy to help his father on the farm. Accepting this, Andy returns home then decides to form his fate. With the help of a wealthy benefactor, he moves from his small town and is lead through work traveling across the country. This book is part of a series of rags…
Shares: Conduct of life in fiction, Conduct of life
King Rat
The time is World War II. The place is a brutal prison camp deep in Japanese-occupied territory. Here, within the seething mass of humanity, one man, an American corporal, seeks dominance over both captives and captors alike. His weapons are human courage, unblinking understanding of human weaknesses, and total willingness to exploit every opportunity to enlarge his power and corrupt or destroy…
Shares: Prisoners of war, World War II, Historical Fiction
Pretty Little Liars
Everyone has something to hide—especially high school juniors Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna. Spencer covets her sister's boyfriend. Aria's fantasizing about her English teacher. Emily's crushing on the new girl at school. Hanna uses some ugly tricks to stay beautiful. But they've all kept an even bigger secret since their friend Alison vanished. How do I know? Because I know everything about…
Shares: Teenage fiction, Conduct of life, Friendship, Young Adult
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 of war, World War II
The Book Thief
The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times.
When Death has a story to tell, you listen.
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when…
Shares: Jews, World War II, Young Adult, Historical Fiction
Number the Stars
Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend, Ellen Rosen, often think about life before the war. But it's now 1943, and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching in their town.
The Nazis won't stop. The Jews of Denmark are being "relocated," so Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family. Then Annemarie is…
Shares: Jews, World War II, Friendship, 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, History
House on Endless Waters
"At the behest of his agent, renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to meet with his Dutch publisher, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon a looping reel of photos offering a glimpse of pre-war Dutch Jewish life, and is astonished to see the youthful…
Shares: Jews, World War II, History
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, History
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
Pan Michael An historical novel
The third and final book of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy takes a closer and more intimate look at one of the series’ protagonists: Pan Michael Volodyovski. The Polish Commonwealth has been through intense periods of war, and the peace that follows leaves one of its greatest heroes, Pan Michael, finally free to marry his beloved Panna Anusia. But in a twist of fate, she falls ill and dies, leaving…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
St. George and St. Michael
It was the middle of autumn, and had rained all day. Through the lozenge-panes of the wide oriel window the world appeared in the slowly gathering dusk not a little dismal. The drops that clung trickling to the dim glass added rain and gloom to the landscape beyond, whither the eye passed, as if vaguely seeking that help in the distance, which the dripping hollyhocks and sodden sunflowers…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Shares: Teenage fiction, Young Adult
Friends Though Divided
My dear lads: Although so long a time has elapsed since the great civil war in England, men are still almost as much divided as they were then as to the merits of the quarrel, almost as warm partisans of the one side or the other. Most of you will probably have formed an opinion as to the rights of the case, either from your own reading, or from hearing the views of your elders.
Shares: Friendship, Historical Fiction, History
The Only Woman in the Room
Hedy Kiesler is lucky. Her beauty leads to a starring role in a controversial film and marriage to a powerful Austrian arms dealer, allowing her to evade Nazi persecution despite her Jewish heritage. But Hedy is also intelligent. At lavish Vienna dinner parties, she overhears the Third Reich's plans. One night in 1937, desperate to escape her controlling husband and the rise of the Nazis, she…
Shares: Jews, World War II
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 of war, World War II
Let The Circle be Unbroken
Let the Circle Be Unbroken is a story of a small Mississippi town in the 1930s, and the troubles that plague its black community. Picking up where its precursor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, leaves off, Mildred Taylor recounts the trials of this small community through the characters of the Logan family. More specifically, it focuses on the children of the family; Stacey, Cassie, Little Man and…
Shares: Prejudices, Young Adult, Historical Fiction
The Winemaker's Wife
"Champagne, 1940: Inès has just married Michel, the owner of storied champagne house Maison Chauveau, when the Germans invade. As the danger mounts, Michel turns his back on his marriage to begin hiding munitions for the Résistance. Inès fears they'll be exposed, but for Céline, half-Jewish wife of Chauveau's chef de cave, the risk is even greater-rumors abound of Jews being shipped east to an…
Shares: Jews, World War II