100 Books Like Fair Stood the Wind for France

I remember reading this in my student bedsit and being transfixed. I was studying art but had just decided that I wanted to be a novelist. As such, I loved the opening lines: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

It is a simple yet beautiful book about love, belief, and betrayal. I’m not religious, but the testing of someone’s faith and how it may make them act stuck with me. Also, the facade of the ‘stiff upper lip,’ but underneath, the vulnerability.

It is a beautifully atmospheric, Blitz-era novel about passions and complex relationships in the noir blackout and who can be trusted in such times. 

Published just after the war, it captures the period in a way that those born decades later can only dream of doing. My mum was an un-evacuated child in London during the Blitz, and her school was bombed to the ground by the Luftwaffe—but luckily, on a Saturday.

England is flawed as a nation, then and now, but it’s important to remember the unique evil of the Nazis. Most individuals are flawed in much more minor ways. The novels I have chosen all contain imperfect people making mistakes. To me, that’s true life. It’s what I relate to.

This is an unusual novel in that it shows the lives of British soldiers in Sicily during World War Two, but there is no actual fighting. Instead we see the soldiers’ lives from the inside as they struggle with boredom, frustration, and try to interact with the locals. There are no heroics or sentimental patriotism, instead we see the soldiers in all their humanity, including their weaknesses. Above all it does what all good writing should do, takes you into a vividly believable world of emotion and behavior.  

Patrick Hamilton has a wonderfully simple and direct style, and is always utterly compelling, no matter if he’s writing about ordinary people going about their daily lives. This wartime novel seems to happen a long way from the war itself, though it is set in Maidenhead, which was far enough away from the capital to be thought safe for evacuees. We spend our time with a wonderfully cliquey and gossipy set of boarding house tenants who constantly compete with each other and have their own little wars and conflicts. Like many of Hamilton’s novels it has a theatrical quality, reading it is almost like watching actors performing on a stage. Indeed, one of the characters is an actor, and theatre provides a note of redemption in this beautifully bleak novel. 

A clown shows up at the trial of Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity. What is he doing there? Written half a century after WWII, In Our Strange Gardens invites its readers to go beyond a black-and-white tinted version of the German Occupation of France. Heroes are not heroic, and the enemy is not always a villain. The story of a man who was embarrassed by his clowning father as kid before learning about his past during the war, In Our Strange Gardens is also a lesson of the power of derision in the face of tragedy. 

A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France with two girls on board, Maddie, the pilot, and Verity. Leaving Maddie behind in the wreckage, secret agent Verity is captured by the Nazis and told that she will be executed unless she reveals her mission.

This heart-stopping tale of spies, deception, and true friendship will have you reading through the night—and cheering for Verity.

I came across this remarkable contemporary memoir, written by a Jewish journalist between 1943 and 1945 when researching a specific village in the Dordogne. Scheyer's family happened to have been hidden first in the village and then in a local convent.

This was only part of the extraordinary experiences of the writer during the Second World War when he was forced to flee Vienna and ended up in rural France, having been incarcerated twice. I do not think any other writer could recount their experiences in such simple yet powerful prose. It is one of only a handful of memoirs that have left me so full of admiration. A unique document.

Lovers of World War 2 and the interwar years will like this book. It partly goes into life during Nazi-occupied France during WW2 and its aftermath. Although this book is about one woman’s revenge against her former lover, it gives the reader an idea of what life was like during the occupation. It helped me understand the problems people go through and who their real friends are when faced with adversity. Even though people may do wicked things to others or to those who have harmed them, their conscience gets the better of them when it comes to helping those who have shown them kindness. Their good side is revealed; so therefore, it is always good to find the saving grace rather than just the bad qualities in people.

This fascinating book follows 230 women, some more in-depth than others, who were imprisoned outside Paris for crimes of resistance activities. I began reading it as research and became captivated by the stories, especially the devotion the women developed for one another. I felt a deep connection to each of the prisoners as I climbed into their shoes, cheering for them to survive while fearing they would not. (The Appendix lists the 49 who survived if you want to know in advance. I didn’t.) It’s difficult to grasp what they endured over an unimaginable period of time. Just the sheer depth of their hunger is something I’ve never come close to experiencing. Moorehead keeps the tone intimate and compassionate. Yes, their suffering could be hard to read, but at the same time, I found inspiration as if they spoke to me from the past of the power of mutual dependency-… show more.

I have always been fascinated with WWII war stories, especially those involving intelligence operations.

Double Cross is one of the most unbelievable stories I've ever read. It's a nonfiction book that's so incredible it almost sounds like fiction. The British scored success after success against all the German intelligence services to keep the Germans guessing about dozens of Allied military activities, including the actual site of the D-Day landings.

MI6 might get all the cool James Bond movies made about it, but MI5 was the real star of this book.