Showing titles in World War II & Holocaust

Poland, 1942: seventeen-year-old Maya Schulze is struggling to survive in a brutal Nazi labour camp. But despite days filled with hunger, fear, and despair, she is able to find courage and beauty in dancing–it is only then that she feels free. One day, a camp guard watches Maya perform, and both their destinies are changed for ever. Jan falls in love with Maya and promises to protect her; Maya lives for their stolen moments together, when her heart can dance again. Jan ultimately plots Maya’s escape and promises to find her when the war is over, but fate cruelly intervenes.

The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre is a thrilling, sumptuous work of historical fiction told in three timelines: before, during and after WWII. This completely immersive story takes listeners from the dangerous, intrigue-filled rooms in Switzerland where elites of both sides mingled and schemed during the war, to the glamorous halls of the House of Dior in the golden age of French fashion and journalism.

Berlin, 1943: Ava Müller is a proud supporter of the German war effort, working for Joseph Goebbels alongside her father, a high-ranking official in the Reich. With her sister Hanna, a nurse, braving bombing raids to save lives, they are a model Nazi family. Until Ava discovers her parents and Hanna are secretly working for the resistance… Returning to their country home, Ava is shocked to find her childhood friend Eliana Goldman and her family hidden in the attic.

Gordon Parker is an eager eighteen-year-old Australian boy desperate to fight for his country, and Nobuko 'Cherry' Sakuramoto is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling to survive in Japan in the aftermath of World War II. But when they fall in love, they change the course of history.

1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier; Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.

London, 1941. The Blitz. When a Royal Navy memo arrives at head office, requesting female recruits to sign up as motorcycle dispatch riders, delivering highly classified orders across the country, three women jump at the chance to sign up for the most dangerous jobs in London.

Two weeks before D-day, the French Resistance attacks a chateau containing a telephone exchange vital to German communications - but the building is heavily guarded, and the attack fails disastrously. Flick Clairet, a young British secret agent, proposes a daring new plan: she will parachute into France with an all-woman team known as the Jackdaws, and they will penetrate the chateau in disguise. But, unknown to Flick, Rommel has assigned a brilliant, ruthless intelligence colonel, Dieter Franck, to crush the Resistance. And Dieter is on Flick's trail....

From the globally best-selling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. 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. A new life awaits her in Winchester. Yes, it is one of draughty boarding-houses and sidelong glances at her naked ring finger from younger colleagues; but it is also a life gleaming with independence and opportunity.

In the midst of WWII, an English mother, Norah, places her eight-year-old daughter on a ship leaving Malaya, desperate to keep her safe from the Japanese army as they move down through the Pacific. In Singapore, a Welsh-Australian nurse, Nesta, has enlisted to tend to Allied troops. But as the island falls to the Japanese she joins the terrified cargo of people, including the heartbroken Norah, crammed aboard the Vyner Brooke merchant ship. Only two days later, they are bombarded from the air off the coast of Indonesia, and in a matter of hours, the Vyner Brooke lies broken on the seabed.

Auschwitz, 1942: This unforgettable novel, based on a true story, brings to life history’s most powerful tale of forbidden love. Set within the barbed wire of Auschwitz, a man and a woman fall in love against unimaginable odds. What happens next will restore your faith in humanity and make you believe in hope even where hope should not exist.

A thrilling tale and powerful love story that tells the heroic and tragic true story of the German resistance in World War II. When Hitler comes to power in 1933, a tight-knit group of friends and lovers become hunted outlaws overnight. United in their resistance to the madness and tyranny of Nazism, they must flee the country. Dora, passionate and fearless, her lover, the great playwright Ernst Toller, her younger cousin Ruth and Ruth's husband, Hans, find refuge in London.

Paris, 1942: Anabel Martinet is a jewel thief, descended from a family that has spent centuries stealing from the unkind and giving to the deserving. Never has that mattered more than now, in the midst of the Nazi Occupation, and despite the enormous risks, Anabel begins stealing from Germans and collaborators and funnelling money to the French Resistance. But when she takes a pair of valuable bracelets from a high-ranking Nazi officer, she finds herself - and her two young daughters - in the line of fire from the Germans, with devastating consequences.

For twenty-one-year-old Grace Fitzgerald, life is finally looking bright. Orphaned as a child and later struck down by polio, she then endured years of cold indifference at the hands of her sister Agnes. Now, with Agnes finally gone, Grace has found love with her handsome young husband and peace surrounded by friends in her home village of Knocknashee and in her ongoing friendship with the American journalist Richard Lewis.

In Sydney, siblings Donald and Sarah Macintosh battle for their father's approval, and control of his empire, while their cousin David fights the enemy across the continents. US Marine Pilot James Duffy defies his grandfather's wishes, and a number of times, death, protecting Australian skies from the Japanese. Below, trapped in the jungles of Malaya, Diane Duffy is caught between saving the lives of hundreds of orphaned children, or that of her son. While Tom Duffy finds himself enlisting in yet another world war, his daughter, Jessica, narrowly escapes slaughter at a mission station.

Fatherland is set in an alternative world where Hitler has won the Second World War. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb. As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich.

In the spring of 1942, young Elzbieta Rabinek is aware of the swiftly growing discord just beyond the courtyard of her comfortable Warsaw home. But she has no idea what goes on behind the walls of the Jewish Ghetto nearby until she makes a discovery that propels her into a dangerous world of deception and heroism. Elzbieta comes face to face with the plight of the Gorka family who must give up their newborn daughter - or watch her starve. For Roman Gorka, this final injustice stirs in him a rebellion not even his newfound love for Elzbieta can suppress.

Life changed beyond recognition for Alice when her son, Eddie, was born with autism spectrum disorder. She must do everything to support him, but at what cost to her family? When her cherished grandmother is hospitalised, a hidden box of mementos reveals a tattered photo of a young man, a tiny leather shoe and a letter. Her grandmother begs Alice to return to Poland to see what became of those she held dearest.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, an enthralling historical saga that recreates the danger, romance, and sacrifice of an era and brings to life one courageous, passionate American - Mildred Fish Harnack - and her circle of women friends who waged a clandestine battle against Hitler in Nazi Berlin.

May, 1964. At a youth festival in East Berlin, an unlikely young couple fall in love. In the bright spring days, anything seems possible for them - it is only many years later, after her death, that Kaspar discovers the price his wife paid to get to him in West Berlin. Shattered by grief, Kaspar sets off to uncover Birgit's secrets in the East. His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and to a young girl who accepts him as her grandfather. Their worlds could not be more different - but he is determined to fight for her.

1942: a German spy comes ashore on a desolate stretch of Lincolnshire beach. But he is hunted down by a young detective, Richard Prince. The secret services have need of a man like him.... In occupied Europe, Denmark is a hotbed of problems for British intelligence. Rumours of a war-ending weapon being developed by the Germans are rife. Sent to Copenhagen, Prince is soon caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Dodging Gestapo agents, SS muscle and the danger of betrayal, his survival - and the war effort - hangs in the balance.