World War II

From the author of When God Was a Rabbit and Tin Man, Still Life is a big-hearted story of people brought together by love, war, art and the ghost of E.M. Forster....

Two sisters. One must be brave. One should be afraid. Bravery, courage, fear, and love in a time of war....

From the night she is rescued as a baby out of the flames of a sinking ship, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a lust for freedom and danger....

Don’t miss the sweeping new summer audiobook from Fern Britton....

Plymouth, 1941. As sirens blare all around, the Shawbrook family take refuge in a packed shelter. Bombs have already begun to fall through the night sky when they realise their infant son, Freddie, has been forgotten in the rush, left to sleep in his crib....

Germany, late summer 1945. The war is over, but the country is in ruins....

May 1944. When spy Elisabeth de Mornay, code name Cécile, notices a coded transmission from an agent in the field does not bear his usual signature, she suspects his cover has been blown - something that is happening with increasing frequency....

Following the death of her mother, Becky begins the sad task of sorting through her empty flat. Starting with the letters piling up on the doormat, she finds an envelope post-marked from Cornwall. In it is a letter that will change her life forever....

Laura, an impoverished Cornish girl, meets her husband when they are both in service in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura's husband returns home from the trenches a damaged man, already ill with the tuberculosis that will soon leave her a widow....

Woven through with Chinese folklore and a tantalizing mystery, this novel is a pause-resister of the highest order....

May 1944. Hope and excitement is in the air when news breaks of the allied forces landing in Normandy. D Day has arrived. However, the day-to-day struggles for the Tobacco Girls continue.

As the clouds of war grow bleaker both at home and abroad, the Tobacco Girls are determined to do their bit for king and country....

The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for 29 years after the end of World War II....

Yorkshire, 1943. Lily Baines, a bright young debutante increasingly ground down by an endless war, has traded in her white gloves for a set of headphones. It’s her job to intercept enemy naval communications and send them to Bletchley Park for decryption....

Three very different women are recruited to the mysterious Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes....

The Magician tells the story of Thomas Mann, whose life was filled with great acclaim and contradiction....

The war is over; Hitler is dead - and yet his evil legacy lives on. Saffron Courtney and her beloved husband, Gerhard, only just survived the brutal conflict, but Gerhard's Nazi-supporting brother, Konrad, is still free and determined to regain power.... 

Germany, 1937. Fear and betrayal stalk the streets. People disappear. Persecution of the Jews has become a national pastime. When Ruth Friedman's husband is arrested by the SS, she is left to fend for herself and her four children....

To live among wolves, first you must become one... An unmissable new spy thriller from best-selling master of the genre, Alex Gerlis...

When Jeanne uncovers a dusty old box in her father’s garage, her world as she knows it is turned upside down. She has inherited a bookstore in a tiny French village, just outside of Paris, from a mysterious woman named Laurence....

Sometimes, the difficult thing is not to flee but to return. A love letter to Chile that soars from the Spanish Civil War to the rise and fall of Pinochet, and a stunning return to great storytelling heights....

It is 1932, and the losses of the First World War are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé and her brother and regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother and strike out alone....

The present: Emilie de la Martiniéres has always fought against her aristocratic background, but after the death of her glamorous, distant mother, she finds herself alone in the world and sole inheritor of her grand childhood home in the south of France....

Caroline Grant is struggling to accept the end of her marriage when she receives an unexpected bequest. Her beloved great-aunt Lettie leaves her a sketchbook, three keys, and a final whisper...Venice....

The haunting stand-alone novel from the best-selling author of the Shardlake series, C. J. Sansom....

Germany, 1938: A young interfaith couple discover true love, but they must keep this love a secret—from family, from friends, and especially from the Nazis. She lives in the Jewish Quarter, and he lives in the city proper. Charlotte, a young girl of 15, wanders into Georg’s cobbler shop to have some shoes repaired. Georg, enamored by Charlotte’s charm and grace, decides right then and there that he is going to marry her. 

It's no secret why. As a child, I made too much difficulty for my folks and the area, and generally pulled off it. At 15, I turned my life around and turned into a title sprinter. A couple of years after the fact, I went to the 1936 Olympics, and at school, I was twice NCAA mile champion record holder. In the Second Great War, my plane collided with the Pacific Sea on, unexpectedly, a res-prompt mission. I disappeared and everybody thought I was dead.

At 17, Renee Rushmore lives at home with her father Ivan—a cruel man who rules the house with an iron fist and keeps Renee isolated and alone. She is desperate to escape him, but with no friends to help her, what hope does she have? Then war breaks out. With factories and farms looking to take on female workers, Renee dares to hope that her freedom might be within grasp. And when she hears through a kindly local farmhand named Jimmy that Oak Valley Farm is in need of help, she might just have found her chance.

Bologna, Italy, 1944, and the streets are crawling with German soldiers. Nineteen-year-old Leila Venturi is shocked into joining the Resistance after her beloved best friend Rebecca, the daughter of a prominent Jewish businessman, is ruthlessly deported to a concentration camp. In the spring of 1981, exchange student Rhiannon Hughes arrives in Bologna to study at the university. There, she rents a room from Leila, who is now middle-aged. Leila’s nephew, Gianluca, offers to show Rhiannon around but Leila warns her off him.

Peggy Serrano couldn’t wait for her best friend to come home from the war. But the Jimmy Barnett who returns is much different from the Jimmy who left, changed so drastically by his experience as a medic in Europe that he can barely function. When he attempts the unthinkable, his parents check him into the VA hospital. Peggy determines to help the Barnetts unravel what might have happened to send their son over the edge. She starts by contacting Jimmy’s war buddies, trying to identify the mysterious woman in the photo they find in Jimmy’s belongings.

The Paris Library meets The Flight Girls in this captivating historical novel about the sacrifice and courage necessary to live a life of honor, inspired by the first female volunteer librarians during World War I and the first women accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy.

Paris 1930s. Childhood companions Fleur and Colette make a vow, under the trailing ivy of their secret garden, that they will be secret sisters forever. But as they grow up, the promises of childhood are put to the ultimate test. For Colette is the daughter of the house, and her life is all jazz clubs, silk dresses and chilled champagne, while Fleur is the orphan niece of the housekeeper and doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. Years later, in 1939, life as they know it will never be the same.

April 1942. Enemy gunfire on Penzance beach brings the Cornish Girls rushing to the rescue. But even as the war rages around them, the biggest challenge facing each woman turns out to be one of the heart. Can the Cornish Girls help one another to open themselves up to love?

Norfolk, 1944. Phylly is a Land Girl on Catchetts Farm. She and her friend Gracie are doing their bit to support the war effort. But times are changing at Catchetts—there's an evacuee and two P.O.Ws on their way.... And then Phylly meets an American airman from the base up the road. As the war rages on the continent, Phylly and Gracie's world will be changed forever.

1942. Working in the greengrocers and playing the piano in the pub a couple of nights a week isn't fulfilling nineteen-year-old Trixie Smith's idea of helping Britain win the war. One day she sees a poster advertising the Women's Timber Corps and decides to sign up—soon she is on her way to Scotland for four weeks of training to become a Lumberjill. On her journey north she meets Cy, an American soldier on leave. Their attraction is instant and they both feel that fate has brought them together.

Germany 1939–To save her baby, Trudi Beck must hand her over to strangers who will take her across the sea to a foreign country. Trudi has already lost her husband to the Nazis, her stepsons are taking the train too. Walking away from the train station with empty arms is the hardest thing she's ever done. London 1939 – Newly married, Sally Matthews, is alone again. Her husband is away training for war, leaving her days and home empty. She volunteers to help with the children from the Kindertransport, becoming captivated by five-year-old Tom and his baby sister, Liesel. 

May 1944. Hope and excitement is in the air when news breaks of the allied forces landing in Normandy. D Day has arrived. However, the day-to-day struggles for the Tobacco Girls continue. Peace is on the horizon, but will their wishes and dreams win through and bring them a happy ever after?

As World War II dawns over the United States, the newly-formed Office of Strategic Services calls upon the Conjurus, people born with the ability to control various elements, to assist in the war effort. Among them is Jay Loalin, and his first mission hits close to home when he learns that an SS officer, now the head of a branch dedicated to the study of magical beings, witnessed his father’s magic and has dedicated his life to merging the delicate and dangerous magic of the Conjurus and witchcraft to create the ultimate superman.

London, 1940. Bombs fall and Josie Banks’ world crumbles around her. Her overbearing husband, Stan, is unreachable, called to service. Her home, a ruin of rubble and ash. Josie’s beloved tearoom boss has been killed, and Josie herself is injured, with nothing left and nowhere to go. Evacuated to the English countryside, Josie ends up at the estate of the aristocratic Miss Harcourt, a reluctant host to the survivors of the Blitz. Now a threat looms larger than anyone imagined. And a dangerous secret is about to upend Josie’s life again. 

A brilliant female codebreaker. An “unbreakable” Japanese naval code. A pilot on a top-secret mission that could change the course of WWII. The Codebreaker's Secret is a dazzling story of love and intrigue set during America’s darkest hour.