Second World War fiction
Showing 1–16 of 26 results
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A Conflict of Interests
£8.99A Conflict of Interests
June 1944, Romsey, England. Josephine ‘Jo’ Fox is at an impasse since the unwelcome return of her wayward husband Richard. So, when he disappears again, she is neither concerned nor surprised – until a burning car is discovered with a body inside. And there are signs that Richard is somehow involved. Jo is determined to find both her husband and answers, yet with her friend Bram Nash in hospital suffering an infection of his old war wound, she must do so alone. When information comes to light that implicates Bram too, Jo finds herself on a dangerous path to the truth. But what will be left for her when all is revealed?
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An ordinary youth
£9.99An ordinary youth
Following the Kempowski family from the months before the outbreak of war through to the fall of Berlin, ‘An Ordinary Youth’ is the fascinating story of an ordinary childhood in extraordinary times. Here, Walter’s academic struggle sits alongside his father’s conscription; his brother’s love of jazz burgeons amid the destruction of the barrages. And all the while, the horrors of Nazism loom in the peripheries – communicated in furtive looks or hushed conversations – running alongside the Kempowski family’s daily rituals and occasional scandals.
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Beyond summerland
£9.99Beyond summerland
The latest book from New York Times bestselling novelist Jenny Lecoat is set in the aftermath of the liberation of Jersey in June 1945 – a page-turning story of what happens to ordinary people in extraordinary times, when faced with the worst of circumstances and the cruellest of choices.
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Biggles in the Baltic
£12.99Biggles in the Baltic
War is declared, and Biggles is ready for action! September 1939. Britain has declared war on Germany. Major James Bigglesworth, known to his friends as ‘Biggles’, is eager to get straight into the action alongside old friends Algernon ‘Algy’ Lacey and ‘Ginger’ Hebblethwaite. They don’t have to wait long. The British government has covertly acquired a small island in the Baltic, off the north coast of Germany. The island is unremarkable save for one feature: a natural sea cave, unknown to the Germans, large enough to house several aircraft. Biggles’ orders: wreak havoc on German forces for as long as possible without compromising the location of the secret base. It’s a dangerous mission, for the might of the enemy military machine will be bent on finding them, led by Biggles’ old nemesis, Erich von Stalhein.
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Biggles sees it through
£12.99Biggles sees it through
Biggles has a cold war. November 1939. The Winter War between the Finns and the Soviets has begun, and Finland has called for international support. Biggles, Algy, and Ginger have volunteered to help, and fly reconnaissance missions over the country on the lookout for Soviet troops and aircraft. Quite by chance on one such flight, Biggles spots a lone figure at death’s door in the snow, and lands to investigate. The man is Petolski, a Polish scientist. His plane crashed on the Finland-Russia border while he was trying to escape Occupied Poland with seven years’ worth of experimental aircraft research. Rather than let it fall into enemy hands, he has hidden it somewhere near the downed plane. The research cannot fall into enemy hands, and Biggles is ordered to retrieve it at all costs.
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Catch-22
£9.99Catch-22
At the heart of Joseph Heller’s bestselling novel is a satirical indictment of military madness and stupidity, and the desire of the ordinary man to survive it. It is the tale of Captain Yossarian who spends his time plotting to survive.
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Dear Mrs Bird
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Flatlands
£9.99Flatlands
Freda is a twelve-year-old evacuee from East London, who has been sent away at the start of the war, leaving behind everything familiar to her, to escape the expected German bombing. In her new temporary home in Lincolnshire, Freda finds herself billeted with a strange, cold and, ultimately, abusive couple, whose lives mirror the barren landscape in which they live a hand to mouth existence, based upon subsistence farming and poaching. There, deprived of any warmth, she meets a young man – Philip Rhayader – a conscientious objector who has left Oxford and his prospective vocation in the church following a nervous breakdown. Slowly, he introduces her to the wonders of the natural world and its enduring power to heal.
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Meet me at Rainbow Corner
£16.99Meet me at Rainbow Corner
London, 1944. The air raid sirens are blaring, the bombers are hovering. England has been at war with Germany for four years, and there’s no sign of peace coming. Dot Gallagher, newly arrived from Liverpool to offer her services as a nurse, hurries from her Red Cross hostel to the tube station to join the crowds of people taking shelter. A group of GIs have started dancing around a wind-up gramophone, and it doesn’t take long for Dot to join them. As she jives along with one of the American soldiers, he tells her about Rainbow Corner, a social club in Piccadilly for US troops. There is always a demand for dance hostesses there, women who know how to jitterbug and rock’n’roll, to dance with the soldiers. Would Dot like to apply? As Dot discovers, Rainbow Corner is like no other place, an oasis in London where, once inside, the constraints of wartime Britain disappear.
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Mirror of our sorrows
£10.99Mirror of our sorrows
April, 1940. Louise Belmont runs, naked, down the boulevard du Montparnasse. To understand the tragic scene she has just experienced, she will have to plunge into the madness of the ‘Phoney War’, when the whole of France, seized by the panic of a new World War, descends into chaos. Alongside bistro-owner Monsieur Jules, new recruit Gabriel and small-time crook Raoul, Louise navigates this period of enormous upheaval and extraordinary twists of fate, for as the Nazi’s advance, the threat of German occupation will uncover long-buried secrets and make strange bedfellows. With his characteristic wit and verve, Pierre Lemaitre chronicles the greatness and decline of a people crushed by circumstance. In ‘Mirror of Our Sorrows’, the final novel in the Paris between-the-wars trilogy, is an incandescent tale that is both burlesque and tragic.
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Miss Harris in the New World
£9.99Miss Harris in the New World
A collection of theatrical misfits goes on tour across the Atlantic in this nostalgic post-war novel sure to delight fans of P. G. WodehouseÂ
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Mother’s boy
£10.99Mother’s boy
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. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises her boy alone, working as a laundress, and gradually becomes aware that he is some kind of genius. As an intensely private young man, Charles signs up for the navy with the new rank of coder. His escape from the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston to the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.
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Murder Before Evensong
£9.99Murder Before Evensong
Canon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton. He has been there for eight years, arriving at the invitation of the patron and landowner, Bernard, Baron de Floures, of Champton House. Daniel’s previous post was curate at a smart central London parish, where he got to know the de Floures family through his brother Theo, an up-and-coming actor and socialite. Audrey Clement, his widowed mother, lives with him at the Rectory on the estate. He has two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda. The story begins with Daniel announcing from the pulpit a plan to install a lavatory in church. This is long overdue, he thinks and so does Bernard de Floures, but the announcement goes down badly with the parish. Firm opposition comes from Mrs Harper and Mrs Dollinger of the Flower Guild, who are habitual opposers of change. There is opposition too from others who do not like the the thought of matters lavatorial in church.
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Slaughterhouse 5
£9.99Slaughterhouse 5
Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber’s assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?
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The blood of others
£9.99The blood of others
Jean Blomart, privileged bourgeois turned patriot leader against the Nazi occupation, waits through the night for his lover to die. Flashbacks interweave the stories of both their lives until, with dawn approaching, Jean faces a monumental decision.
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The gift of rain
£10.99The gift of rain
Penang, 1939. 16-year-old Philip Hutton is a loner. Half English, half Chinese and feeling neither, he discovers a sense of belonging in an unexpected friendship with Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat. Philip shows his new friend around his adored island of Penang, and in return Endo trains him in the art and discipline of aikido. But such knowledge comes at a terrible price. The enigmatic Endo is bound by disciplines of his own and when the Japanese invade Malaya, threatening to destroy Philip’s family and everything he loves, he realises that his trusted sensei to whom he owes absolute loyalty has been harbouring a devastating secret. Philip must risk everything in an attempt to save those he has placed in mortal danger and discover who and what he really is.
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