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Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > War fiction > Second World War fiction
Down to the Potter's House is a 1921-1942 historic novel that takes
the tenacious Gracie Maxwell from the quicksand of mediocrity to
higher ground as she climbs and never stops. Across the way, evil
is beginning to bubble beneath the surface and only one soul will
buoy and begin to float as the flood waters rise. Not everyone has
escaped the lies that are holding them hostage. Fortified with
bully-proofed valor to ride out the undercurrents, the Maxwell clan
lays bare the daunting portrayal of what matters most in life -
family, faith, love - and the main attractions are given their shot
at setting the captives free.
A heart-warming wartime story of love and friendship, from the
author of the award-winning THE MOTHER'S DAY CLUB Norfolk, 1944
Land Girls, Phylly and Gracie, have become the best of friends -
but war work is never easy at Catchetts Farm . . . Poor Gracie
wakes each morning worrying about whether she'll ever get to see
her airman husband again. And Phylly is trying - and failing - to
encourage Jimmy, an evacuee from London, to open up about his
heartbreaking past. When they meet Edwin, a handsome airman from
the American Airforce, it soon becomes clear that Jimmy isn't the
only one playing his cards close to his chest. But what could Edwin
wish to hide from the girls? Being a Land Girl means back-breaking
work in all weathers, and the girls are determined want to do their
bit to support the war effort. As their hardship grows, will the
friendship between Phylly and Gracie be strong enough to see them
through? A Home from Home is the perfect wartime family saga,
filled with heart-warming friendships and a courageous
make-do-and-mend attitude. Perfect for fans of Donna Douglas and
Elaine Everest. Readers LOVE Rosie Hendry: 'I highly recommend this
book and give it a well-deserved five stars' 'It's books like this
that remind me why I love reading . . . I can't wait to read more
from Rosie Hendry' 'Fabulous - can't wait to read the next book'
'Beautifully written . . . Thank you to Rosie Hendry for writing
this five-star book' 'A fantastic book - highly recommended'
WHAT IF HITLER HAD SURVIVED? In the gripping new spy thriller from
the Sunday Times bestselling author of Hitler's Secret, a Cambridge
spy must find the truth behind Hitler's death. But exactly who is
the man in the bunker? 'MASTER OF THE WARTIME SPY THRILLER' -
FINANCIAL TIMES ________________ Germany, late summer 1945 - The
war is over but the country is in ruins. Millions of refugees and
holocaust survivors strive to rebuild their lives in displaced
persons camps. Millions of German soldiers and SS men are held
captive in primitive conditions in open-air detention centres.
Everywhere, civilians are desperate for food and shelter. No one
admits to having voted Nazi, yet many are unrepentant. Adolf Hitler
is said to have killed himself in his Berlin bunker. But no body
was found - and many people believe he is alive. Newspapers are
full of stories reporting sightings and theories. Even Stalin,
whose own troops captured the bunker, has told President Truman he
believes the former Fuhrer is not dead. Day by day, American and
British intelligence officers subject senior members of the Nazi
regime to gruelling interrogation in their quest for their truth.
Enter Tom Wilde - the Cambridge professor and spy sent in to find
out the truth... Dramatic, intelligent, and brilliantly compelling,
THE MAN IN THE BUNKER is Rory's best WWII thriller yet - perfect
for readers of Robert Harris, C J Sansom and Joseph Kanon.
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.
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO
PRIZE 2022 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL
FICTION 2022 From one of our greatest living writers comes a
sweeping novel of unrequited love and exile, war and family. The
Magician tells the story of Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with
great acclaim and contradiction. He would find himself on the wrong
side of history in the First World War, cheerleading the German
army, but have a clear vision of the future in the second,
anticipating the horrors of Nazism. He would have six children and
keep his homosexuality hidden; he was a man forever connected to
his family and yet bore witness to the ravages of suicide. He would
write some of the greatest works of European literature, and win
the Nobel Prize, but would never return to the country that
inspired his creativity. Through one life, Colm Toibin tells the
breathtaking story of the twentieth century.
___________________________________ 'As with everything Colm Toibin
sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative
achievement -- immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing,
and fully realized' - Richard Ford 'No living novelist dramatizes
artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Toibin . .
. reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can
offer' - Garth Greenwell 'This is not just a whole life in a novel,
it's a whole world' - Katharina Volckmer
'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.
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The Oppermanns
(Paperback)
Lion Feuchtwanger; Introduction by Joshua Cohen
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R485
Discovery Miles 4 850
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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'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
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.
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Jackdaws
(Paperback)
Ken Follett
1
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R285
R258
Discovery Miles 2 580
Save R27 (9%)
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Jackdaws is an irresistible novel of the French Resistance, love, courage and revenge set in the Second War War.
A Failed Mission
Two weeks before D-Day, the French Resistance try to destroy a telephone exchange vital to Nazi communications. Heavily defended, the mission fails disastrously.
A Daring Plan
With invasion looming, Flick Clairet, a British secret agent, proposes a daring but perilous new plan. She, along with an all-female team – the Jackdaws – will infiltrate and neutralise the exchange before Allied Forces land in France.
A Race Against Time
However, unbeknownst to Flick, Rommel has assigned a brilliant spy-catcher – Dieter Franck – to crush the French Resistance. And now Franck is closing in . . .
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.
'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
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When We Had Wings
(Hardcover)
Ariel Lawhon, Kristina McMorris, Susan Meissner
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R672
R611
Discovery Miles 6 110
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From three bestselling authors comes an interwoven tale about a
trio of World War II nurses stationed in the South Pacific who wage
their own battle for freedom and survival. The Philippines, 1941.
When U.S. Navy nurse Eleanor Lindstrom, U.S. Army nurse Penny
Franklin, and Filipina nurse Lita Capel forge a friendship at the
Army Navy Club in Manila, they believe they're living a paradise
assignment. All three are seeking a way to escape their pasts, but
soon the beauty and promise of their surroundings give way to the
heavy mantle of war. Caught in the crosshairs of a fight between
the U.S. military and the Imperial Japanese Army for control of the
Philippine Islands, the nurses are forced to serve under combat
conditions and, ultimately, endure captivity as the first female
prisoners of the Second World War. As their resiliency is tested in
the face of squalid living arrangements, food shortages, and the
enemy's blatant disregard for the articles of the Geneva
Convention, the women strive to keep their hope- and their fellow
inmates-alive, though not without great cost. In this sweeping
story based on the true experiences of nurses dubbed "the Angels of
Bataan," three women shift in and out of each other's lives through
the darkest days of the war, buoyed by their unwavering friendship
and distant dreams of liberation. "Three of the biggest powerhouses
in historical fiction come together to pen this breathtaking story
of three nurses serving in the Philippines during the Second World
War." -PAM JENOFF, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman
with the Blue Star World War II historical fiction Stand-alone
novel Book length: approximately 128,000 words Includes discussion
questions for book clubs
Woman. Wife. Smuggler. Spy . . . TV SERIES IN DEVELOPMENT STARRING
ELIZABETH DEBICKI (TENET, THE CROWN) AS NANCY WAKE A thrilling and
heart-wrenching novel inspired by the astonishing real life story
of Nancy Wake. Perfect for fans of Suzanne Goldring's MY NAME IS
EVA, Kate Quinn's THE ALICE NETWORK and Imogen Kealey's LIBERATION,
soon to be a blockbuster movie. 'Lawhon breathes new life into
Nancy Wake's extraordinary story. Rich and thoroughly researched,
an exciting, well-written account of wartime valour and the
protagonist's qualities shine through' The Times 'This is the next
book I won't be able to stop talking about...so, so good!' 5 stars
(Goodreads reviewer) 'Readers will be transfixed by this story of a
woman who should be a household name' Library Journal 'A gripping
thriller based on the life of Nancy Wake... Will keep readers
turning the pages' Publishers Weekly In 1936, foreign
correspondent, Nancy Wake, witnesses first-hand the terror of
Hitler's rise in Europe. No sooner has Nancy met, fallen in love
with and agreed to marry French industrialist Henri Fiocca, than
the Germans invade France and force her to take on her first code
name of many. The Gestapo call her the White Mouse for her
remarkable ability to evade capture when smuggling Allied soldiers
across borders. She becomes Helene when she leaves France to train
in espionage with an elite special forces group in London. Then,
when she returns to France, she is the deadly Madame Andree. But
the closer France gets to liberation, the more exposed Nancy - and
the people she loves - will become. Inspired by true wartime
events, Code Name Helene is a gripping and moving story of
extraordinary courage, unfaltering resolve, remarkable sacrifice -
and enduring love. Just some of the 5-star reader reviews for Code
Name Helene: 'I finished this a few weeks ago and I'm still
thinking about Helene . . . exceptional' 5 stars (Goodreads
reviewer) 'Will have you turning off phones and TVs and staying up
late to read it' 5 stars (Goodreads reviewer)
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
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