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Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > War fiction > Second World War fiction
A cold-blooded killer stalks a sleepy Suffolk town in this
pitch-perfect WWII crime mystery. December 1939. Sackwater Police
Station feels a million miles from the war effort. Elderly Mr
Orchard keeps wandering off in his pyjamas, little Sylvia Satin is
having a birthday party, and a bookmark has been reported stolen.
Inspector Betty Church - one of the few female officers on the
force - is longing for something to get her teeth into... When a
bomb is dropped on Sackwater, it seems the war has finally reached
them. But Betty can't stop Adolf, however hard she tries. So when a
dead man is found on the beach, she concentrates on hunting an
enemy much closer to home. 'Eccentric and entertaining with a
nicely complex plot'Crime Review. 'A wonderfully gripping
old-fashioned murder mystery' The Lady.
'In this vivid, affecting novel of intertwined destinies and the
enduring power of love against the bleakest odds, Levensohn weaves
a tale saturated with historical accuracy and yet surprisingly
intimate. A Jewish Girl in Paris delivers romance and intrigue to
spare, but the novel's real power lies in its portrayal of how
deeply and sometimes mysteriously we can find ourselves connected
to the past, and to each other.' - Paula Mc Lain, New York Times
bestselling author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark
Paris, 1940, a city under German occupation. A young Jewish girl,
Judith, meets a young man, the son of a wealthy banker and Nazi
sympathizer - his family will never approve of the girl he has
fallen in love with. As the Germans impose more and more
restrictions on Jewish Parisians, the couple secretly plan to flee
the country. But before they can make their escape, Judith
disappears . . . Montreal, 1982. Shortly before his death, Lica
Grunberg confesses to his daughter, that she has an older
half-sister, Judith. Lica escaped the Nazis but lost all contact
with his first-born daughter. His daughter promises to find the
sister she never knew. The search languishes for years, until
Jacobina is spurred on by her young friend Beatrice. Soon the two
women discover a dark family secret, stretching over two continents
and six decades, that will change their lives forever . . .
Inspired by true events and set against the backdrop of the Second
World War, Melanie Levensohn's A Jewish Girl in Paris is a powerful
novel about forbidden love, adapted from a translation by Jamie Lee
Searle.
'Intriguing, comforting and endearingly familiar' Katie Fforde 'The
BBC's most downloaded radio show' The Guardian 'Incredible legacy'
The BBC 'Longest running drama in the world' The i News 'a gripping
plot full of love affairs, deceit, loss and more' Radio Times In
celebration of the 70th anniversary of The Archers hitting the
radio waves. It's 1940 and war has broken out. It is midnight at
the turn of the year, and Walter Gabriel speaks the same line that
opened the very first radio episode - 'And a Happy New Year to you
all!' For Ambridge, a village in the heart of the English
countryside, this year will bring change in ways no one was
expecting. From the Pargetters at Lower Loxley to the loving,
hard-working Archer family at Brookfield Farm, the war will be hard
for all of them. And the New Year brings the arrival of evacuees to
Ambridge, shaking things up in the close-knit rural community. As
the villagers embrace wartime spirit, the families that listeners
have known and loved for generations face an uphill battle to keep
their secrets hidden. Especially as someone is intent on revealing
those secrets to the whole village . . . Beautifully produced, with
stunning endpapers, this is the perfect read for all Archers fans.
A stunning and heartbreaking new novel from Jamila Gavin, the
bestselling and award-winning author of Coram Boy and The Wheel of
Surya. England, 1937. Gwen, Noor, Dodo and Vera are four very
different teenage girls, with something in common. Their parents
are all abroad, leaving them in their English boarding school,
where they soon form an intense friendship. The four friends think
that no matter what, they will always have each other. Then the war
comes. The girls find themselves flung to different corners of the
war, from the flying planes in the Air Transport Auxiliary to going
undercover in the French Resistance. Each journey brings danger and
uncertainty as each of them wonders if they can make it through -
and what will be left of the world. But at the same time, this is
what shows them who they really are - and against this impossible
backdrop, they find new connections and the possibility of love.
Will the four friends ever see each other again? And when the war
is over, who will be left to tell the story? A heartbreaking and
gripping story of hope, fear and unbreakable friendship, for
readers of Code Name Verity and When the World Was Ours.
'Gripping' Wall Street Journal ________________________ At first,
gunner Clarence Smoyer and his fellow crewmen in the legendary 3rd
Armored Division - 'Spearhead' - thought their tanks were
invincible. Then they met the German Panther, with a gun so
murderous it could shoot through one Sherman and into the next.
Soon a pattern emerged: the lead tank always gets hit. After seeing
his friends cut down breaching the West Wall and holding the line
in the Battle of the Bulge, Clarence and his crew are given a
weapon with the power to avenge their fallen brothers: the
Pershing, a state-of-the-art 'super tank', one of twenty in the
European theatre. But with it comes a harrowing new responsibility:
now they will spearhead every attack and, in doing so, will lead
the US Army into its largest urban battle of the war, the fight for
Cologne, the 'Fortress City' of Germany... 'Spearhead shimmers in
eclipsing moments of valor, luck and compassion.' Washington Times
Soon to be a major television event from Pascal Pictures, starring
Tom Holland. Based on the true story of a forgotten hero, the USA
Today and #1 Amazon Charts bestseller Beneath a Scarlet Sky is the
triumphant, epic tale of one young man's incredible courage and
resilience during one of history's darkest hours. Pino Lella wants
nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian
teenager-obsessed with music, food, and girls-but his days of
innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed
by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews
escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six
years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents
force him to enlist as a German soldier-a move they think will keep
him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at
the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf
Hitler's left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third
Reich's most mysterious and powerful commanders. Now, with the
opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command,
Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by
fighting in secret, his courage bolstered by his love for Anna and
for the life he dreams they will one day share. Fans of All the
Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Unbroken will enjoy this
riveting saga of history, suspense, and love.
Culture in Camouflage aims to remap the history of British war
culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the
literature of the Second World War. The book offers the first
comprehensive account of the emergence of modern war culture,
arguing that its exceptional forms and temporalities force us to
reappraise British cultural modernity.
The book explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried
Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth
Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron,
Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene contested the
dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful and
persuasive mass media and culture industry. Patrick Deer reads war
literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also
includes popular culture and mass communications, the productions
of war planners and military historians, projections of new
technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of
strategists, and the material culture of total war.
Modern war cultures, Deer contends, are defined by their drive to
normalize conflict and war-making, by their struggle to colonize
the entire wartime cultural field, and by their claim to monopolize
representations and interpretation of the conflict. But the
mobilization of cultural formations during wartime reveals, at
times glaringly, the constitutive contradictions at the heart of
modern ideas of culture. The Great War failed to produce a popular
war culture on the home front, producing instead an extraordinary
literature of protest, yet the strategists struggled to regain
their oversight over both the enemy across no man's land, and the
minds and bodies of their own mass conscript armies. The interwar
years saw a massive effort to make strategic fantasies a reality;
if the technology of imperial air power or mobile armoured warfare
did not yet exist, culture could be mobilized to shore up the
ramshackle war machine. During World War Two a fully fledged
British war culture emerged triumphant in time of national crisis,
offering the vision of a fully mobilized island fortress, a loyal
empire, and a modernized war machine ready to wage a futuristic war
of space and movement. This was the struggle that British World War
Two writers confronted with extraordinary courage and creativity.
'Immersive' Guardian 'Stunning' Daily Express 'Riveting' Telegraph
Victory is close. Vengeance is closer. Rudi Graf used to dream of
sending a rocket to the moon. Instead, he has helped to create the
world's most sophisticated weapon: the V2 ballistic missile,
capable of delivering a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of
sound. In a desperate gamble to avoid defeat in the winter of 1944,
Hitler orders ten thousand to be built. Graf is tasked with firing
these lethal 'vengeance weapons' at London. Kay Caton-Walsh is an
officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force who joins a unit of
WAAFs on a mission to newly liberated Belgium. Armed with little
more than a slide rule and a few equations, Kay and her colleagues
will attempt to locate and destroy the launch sites. As the death
toll soars, Graf and Kay fight their grim, invisible war - until
one final explosion of violence causes their destinies to
collide... 'A riveting read with a corker of a twist' Daily
Telegraph 'Supremely readable' Observer 'Delivers one hell of a
punch' Express 'Captures the real nature of war. Gripping' Ben
MacIntyre
Reissued with an introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a
stunning and disquieting novel of heroism and cowardiceA masterful
novel that was a huge bestseller in Europe, The Beautiful Mrs.
Seidenman is a testament to the power of literature. Now with an
introduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who named it her
"favorite book no one else has heard of" in the New York Times, the
novel follows Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow in Nazi-occupied
Warsaw in 1943, who possesses two attributes that can spell the
difference between life and death: blue eyes and blond hair. With
these features, and a set of false papers, she slips out of the
ghetto, passing as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an
informer spots her on the street and drags her off to the Gestapo.
At times a dark lament, at others a sly and sardonic thriller, The
Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty-six hours that
follow Irma's arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic
rescue as the last of Warsaw's Jews are about to meet their deaths
in the burning ghetto.
As featured on BBC Radio 4 Good Reads 'A timely, bittersweet comic
novel' Guardian ____________________ What do you do next, after
you've changed the world? It is 1928. Matilda Simpkin, rooting
through a cupboard, comes across a small wooden club - an old
possession of hers, unseen for more than a decade. Mattie is a
woman with a thrilling past and a chafingly uneventful present.
During the Women's Suffrage Campaign she was a militant. Jailed
five times, she marched, sang, gave speeches, smashed windows and
heckled Winston Churchill, and nothing - nothing - since then has
had the same depth, the same excitement. Now in middle age, she is
still looking for a fresh mould into which to pour her energies.
Giving the wooden club a thoughtful twirl, she is struck by an idea
- but what starts as a brilliantly idealistic plan is derailed by a
connection with Mattie's militant past, one which begins to
threaten every principle that she stands for. Old Baggage is a
funny and bittersweet portrait of a woman who has never, never
given up the fight. ____________________ 'Essential . . . Evans is
a brilliant storyteller' Stylist
One of the Claridge's kitchen porters is found dead - strangled. He
was a recent employee who claimed to be Romanian, but evidence
suggests he may have been German. Detective Chief Inspector Coburg
has to find out exactly who he was, and what he was doing at
Claridge's under a false identity. Once he has established those
facts, he might get an insight into why he was killed, and who by.
Coburg's job is complicated by the fact that so many of the hotel's
residents are exiled European royalty. King George of Greece is
registered as 'Mr Brown' and even the Duke of Windsor is staying,
though without Wallis Simpson. Clandestine affairs, furtive
goings-on and conspiracies against the government: Coburg must
tread very lightly indeed .
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Dragonfly
(Paperback)
Leila Meacham
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R444
R412
Discovery Miles 4 120
Save R32 (7%)
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Read the USA Today bestseller from the author of Roses, a "sumptuous, full-bodied, and emotional" novel about five young spies embedded among the highest Nazi ranks in occupied Paris (Adriana Trigiani, NYT bestselling author of Tony's Wife).
At the height of World War II, a handful of idealistic young Americans receive a mysterious letter from the government, asking them if they are willing to fight for their country. The men and women from very different backgrounds -- a Texan athlete with German roots, an upper-crust son of a French mother and a wealthy businessman, a dirt-poor Midwestern fly fisherman, an orphaned fashion designer, and a ravishingly beautiful female fencer -- all answer the call of duty, but each for a secret reason of her or his own. They bond immediately, in a group code-named Dragonfly.
Thus begins a dramatic cat-and-mouse game, as the group seeks to stay under the radar until a fatal misstep leads to the capture and the firing-squad execution of one of their team. But is everything as it seems, or is this one more elaborate act of spycraft?
From the author of The Last Rose of Shanghai comes a profoundly
moving novel about a diplomatic couple who risked their lives to
help Viennese Jews escape the Nazis, based on the true story of Dr.
Ho Fengshan, Righteous Among the Nations. 1938. Dr. Ho Fengshan,
consul general of China, is posted in Vienna with his American
wife, Grace. Shy and ill at ease with the societal obligations of
diplomats' wives, Grace is an outsider in a city beginning to feel
the sweep of the Nazi dragnet. When Grace forms a friendship with
her Jewish tutor, Lola Schnitzler, Dr. Ho requests that Grace keep
her distance. His instructions are to maintain amicable relations
with the Third Reich, and he and Grace are already under their
vigilant eye. But when Lola's family is subjugated to a brutal
pogrom, Dr. Ho decides to issue them visas to Shanghai. As violence
against the Jews escalates after Kristallnacht and threats mount,
Dr. Ho must issue thousands more to help Jews escape Vienna before
World War II explodes. Based on a remarkable true story, Night
Angels explores the risks brave souls took and the love and
friendship they built and lost while fighting against incalculable
evil.
An unforgettable novel of mothers and daughters, wives and muses,
secrets and outright lies 'Freud is a modern literary rarity: a
born storyteller' THE TIMES 'Such a powerful book' RICHARD CURTIS
'Delivers an emotional punch that left me in tears' RACHEL JOYCE
'Utterly compelling' HANNAH ROTHSCHILD 'I couldn't love it more'
POLLY SAMSON 'I loved this book' AMANDA CRAIG 'Completely,
inspiringly wonderful' BARBARA TRAPIDO 'Breathtakingly beautiful'
JULIET NICOLSON AN EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF 2021 Rosaleen is still
a teenager, in the early Sixties, when she meets the famous
sculptor Felix Lichtman. Felix is dangerous, bohemian, everything
she dreamed of in the cold nights at her Catholic boarding school.
And at first their life together is glitteringly romantic -
drinking in Soho, journeying to Marseilles. But it's not long
before Rosaleen finds herself fearfully, unexpectedly alone.
Desperate, she seeks help from the only source she knows, the local
priest, and is directed across the sea to Ireland on a journey that
will seal her fate. Kate lives in Nineties London, stumbling
through her unhappy marriage. But something has begun to stir in
her. Close to breaking point, she sets off on a journey of her own,
not knowing what she hopes to find. Aoife sits at her husband's
bedside as he lies dying, and tells him the story of their
marriage. But there is a crucial part of the story missing and time
is running out. Aoife needs to know: what became of Rosaleen?
Spanning three generations of women, I Couldn't Love You More is an
unforgettable novel about love, motherhood, secrets and betrayal -
and how only the truth can set us free.
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