Books like Blackout in Gretley — picked by fans

I loved the intermingling of history and story, research and plot, in this book. The period details were spot on, and I’ve always been fascinated by the Nazi rocketry program. The underlay of how a great scientific idea can be perverted to unintended consequences was intriguing and frightfully realistic for modern times.

The counterplay between the V2 engineer and the British spy trying to stop V2 launches fascinated me. I loved the conflicted morality of the engineer who wanted to shoot the rocket to the moon instead of at people. 

Spring 1943. Before dawn off the Spanish coast, a cadaver dressed in the uniform of the Royal Marines is placed in the waves. He carries a briefcase containing details of a planned Allied invasion of Greece. The Nazis find the body and its ‘secrets’ and are convinced they have been lucky enough to foil the British plans, but nothing is what it seems. 

This remarkable story of espionage is true. It was an elaborate forensic hoax devised by British intelligence to deceive the enemy, feeding them a false story, thereby allowing troops to invade Sicily instead. It is related with charm and humour by Ewen Montagu, a key figure in the operation. Its elegant, pared-down prose reads like one of Eric Ambler’s novels as it tells how regular chaps used wit and scientific know-how to fight back against the Nazi war machine. And won. Operation Mincemeat, as it was dubbed,… show more.

A Buchanesque MacVicar spins a dark tale of adventure against the charming Scottish scenery of Argyll in this 1939 yarn. Our hero is Alastair Campbell, Glasgow-based journalist and bachelor, whose plans for a cruise along the West Coast of Scotland are thwarted by a storm. Soon, he is stranded on a Hebridean island with a charming young woman – and nefarious individuals who are clearly Up To No Good. After a body turns up, they investigate and uncover a dastardly scenario to spread devastation and panic on Armistice Day (hence the title). Campbell is an appealing ‘lead’, as he doubts his ability yet nonetheless prevails. The villains are chilling, men and women alike, particularly when Campbell imagines the havoc wreaked by their plot in a fine piece of prescient writing. There are boats, guns, and planes galore, all described in expert and compelling detail that lend verisimilitude to a rip-roaring… show more.

One rainy day in 1930s Paris, a copywriter decided to write a thriller and devised a tale about the nuclear bomb, Nazi scientists, and a mysterious Balkan country. This sounds like the start of a novel, but it is the real-life birth of master storyteller Eric Ambler’s first book. A curmudgeonly English physicist is invited to corroborate the nuclear formula, but then... the twist. He is concussed in a car accident and awakes convinced that he is now a super-spy, one Carruthers, who takes on the forces of evil with a Bond-like nonchalance. 

Is the book a parody of earlier spy novels? Perhaps Ambler is seduced by the cleverness of his own story. I don’t actually care. It remains a satisfyingly imaginative tale about the role of science in war, all written in a witty, gritty style that sets the tone for many enjoyable books and films to come.

The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley is a long novel from 1929—and it’s one of the few long novels I have eagerly returned to more than once. Three Britons (a young man, young woman, and older man) are dissatisfied with their lives, and they take to the open road. Along the way they create a travelling musical-comedy troupe, The Good Companions, and we travel along with them for the tryouts, the opening nights, the standing ovations, the missed opportunities, the lucky breaks: and the glories of friendship. The novel offers readers the delicious chance to live entirely in a world now completely vanished.

James Jones's brilliant debut novel must have had a great effect on me because I admit, in many ways, my book covers the same ground – how does a man maintain honor and dignity when constrained to live his life by the choices of other, and much more powerful men? I suppose the difference between our two themes is that the question in my book is about those same choices but wrapped in the question of race. Jones’s characters, while in the military, were dealing with personal issues. My Corporal Buck is dealing with an issue about which all of America is on fire.

From Here to Eternity is 70 years old. I read it in 1969, an eternity ago and it has lasted with me from there to here.  When I was in the Marine Corps I knew everything that was happening to me. But I didn’t know what… show more.

I read this book as a boy, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s the story of American PT boats in the South Pacific during World War II, and the story behind the title captivated me. Every soldier knows that he or she might be sacrificed by a commander to gain time for a retreat or as part of a super-dangerous mission.

The sailors on the boats in White’s story were living examples of how they could be expendable. Even as a boy, this book made me grateful for what I had and grateful to the members of the uniformed services who protected us. That they would make such a commitment makes me love America even more. 

I love reading true stories of WWII told by people who lived through it. I find it difficult to understand how ordinary men could live, fight, and die in a foreign land without questioning in order to protect the United States; they were certainly true patriots. In the fall of 1944, two hundred true patriots of K Company, 333rd Infantry, 84th Division landed in Europe. For the next one hundred days, they were on the edge of the Allied spearhead into Nazi territory. If you ever wanted to be in the infantry, you need to read this book. 

Kristóf (1935-2011) was a Hungarian writer who fled to Switzerland during the war and wrote in French.

The Notebook (the first in the trilogy) is currently number one on my list of all-time favourites. It has all the elements of storytelling that I love: deep, psychological insight into the human heart; adroit use of archetypes, which give the book a timeless, folkloric feel; concision (no waffling) and a poetic, pared-back language that creates a sense of startling immediacy.

Kristóf writes about World War II through the eyes of two young brothers in a Nazi-occupied country (unnamed), and she shocks us awake not through sensationalised violence but through matter-of-fact narration.

It reads like a cross-between dramatic monologue and biblical parable – she stretches the novel form and opens up new possibilities for writing. 

The author clearly did a great deal of research for this book, and this is certainly something I truly love in this World War 2 novel: it provides that solid and rich actual background against which the story is set. It is fascinating to see how both the Nazis and the Allies were playing a game of deception, trying to outmanoeuvre and outsmart each other. The writing is very good, the characters are complex, all with their flaws, all very interesting indeed, all feeling very credible, real. An engaging spy thriller that remains one of my favourite in this genre.