Historical Fiction Set During World War II

“The lives of a Jewish boy escaping Nazi-occupied Europe and a mother and daughter fleeing 21st century El Salvador intersect in this ambitious, intricate novel about war and immigration” (People). The Wind Knows My Name is a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers — and never stop dreaming.

Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences.  In the autumn of 1937, all of that begins to change as Mussolini asserts his power, and in time, everything that the three hold dear — their families, their homes, and their connection to one another — is tested in ways they never could have imagined. Against this backdrop, the intertwined fates of Elisabetta, Marco, Sandro, and their families will be decided, in a heartbreaking story of both the best and the worst that the world has to offer.

For fans of Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a deeply moving novel that follows two Korean sisters separated by World War II. Suspenseful, hopeful, and ultimately redemptive, White Chrysanthemum follows these sisters whose love for each other is strong enough to triumph over the grim evils of war.

Julie Otsuka tells the interned Japanese Americans’ story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: The thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today’s headlines.

A “mesmerizing” (People) novel that weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late 20th century. Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love and for goodness.

From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and As Bright as Heaven comes a novel about a German American teenager whose life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment camp during World War II.

Set against a changing Singapore, a sweeping novel about one boy’s unique gifts and the childhood love that will complicate the fate of his community and country. An aching love story and a powerful coming of age that reckons with the legacy of British colonialism, the World War II Japanese occupation, and the pursuit of modernity, The Great Reclamation confronts the wounds of progress, the sacrifices of love, and the difficulty of defining home when nature and nation collide, literally shifting the land beneath people’s feet.

Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize–winning bestseller lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb-riddled Italian villa in the last days of the war.

Winnie and Helen have kept each other’s worst secrets for more than 50 years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past — including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie’s story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie’s coming to America in 1949.

Henry Lee, a Chinese American, remembers a young Japanese American girl, Keiko, from his childhood in the 1940s with whom he forged a bond of friendship and innocent love. After Keiko and her family were evacuated to the internment camps, she and Henry could only hope that their promise to each other would be kept. Now, 40 years later, Henry’s search will take him on a journey to revisit the sacrifices he has made for family, for love, for country.

An Artist of the Floating World is a sensual and profoundly convincing portrait of the artist as an aging man. At once a multigenerational tale and a samurai death poem written in English, it is also a saga of the clash of the old and new orders, blending classical and contemporary iconography with compassion and wit.

In 1937, Shanghai is a city of great wealth and glamour. Twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. But as Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the Chinese countryside, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the shores of America.

“A lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together” (Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale). Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.

1944: As World War II rages on, a mysterious, deadly fervor spreads across America, transforming people into monstrous aggressors, each provoked into fits of unthinkable barbarity. Maiko and her daughter, Aiko, have been forced into an internment camp in Idaho, where the disease rapidly unfurls, and nearly invisible, demonic spiders seem to follow. When Aiko suddenly escapes, Maiko must race against the clock to find her daughter and untangle the secrets behind the fervor before it catches her first.

As the stories of strangers weave together on one gray November morning in 1941, each of these characters comes to know the compromises demanded by survival, the oppressive power of fear, and the possibility of courage in the face of terror.

Two sisters living on Martha’s Vineyard during World War II find hope in the power of storytelling when they start a wartime book club for women in this spectacular novel inspired by true events, from the New York Times bestselling author of Lilac Girls.

From the bestselling author of The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir comes a thrilling new WWII story about a village busybody — the mighty Mrs. Braithwaite — who resolves to find, and then rescue, her missing daughter.

It’s 1937, and the Japanese are poised to invade Nanjing. Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College, decides to remain at the school and help. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp and Vautrin must struggle day after day to intercede on the behalf of the hapless victims. Yet even when order and civility are restored, she remains deeply embattled, always haunted by the lives she could not save.

1943: When two soldiers arrive at the Rosatis family’s doorstep asking to see an ancient burial site, the Rosatis’ bucolic tranquility is shattered. 1955: Serafina Bettini, an investigator with the Florence Police Department, finds herself digging into past secrets about the Rosatis family that will reveal a breathtaking story of moral paradox, human frailty, and the mysterious ways of the heart.

Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara’s eye-opening and poignant mystery, the story of a young woman searching for the truth after her revered older sister’s death, brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II.

December 1940. In the disorderly evacuation of Southampton, England, newly married Ellen Parr finds a small child asleep on the backseat of an empty bus. No one knows who little Pamela is. Spanning the sweep of the 20th century, We Must Be Brave explores the fierce love that we feel for our children and the power of that love to endure.

It is 1939 in Nazi Germany. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist – books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

Moving deftly from a Japanese POW camp to present-day Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo Evans and his fellow prisoners to that of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

This remarkable tale follows the island of Guernsey during the German Occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name. Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.

Discover the historical novel of love and survival inspired by real resistance workers during World War II Austria, and the mysterious love letter that connects generations of Jewish families.