Books like HHhH — picked by fans

“I ask for freedom for my book.” This was the plea the Ukrainian-Jewish writer and war correspondent Vassily Grossman sent to Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the manuscript of his novel, Life and Fate, was confiscated by the KGB.

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate (in the tradition of Tolstoy) follows an enormous cast of soldiers, scientists, prisoners, bureaucrats, mothers, and children whose lives intersect as Grossman moves seamlessly from freezing trenches and shattered apartment blocks to extermination camps, interrogation rooms, and laboratories haunted by political fear.

What made the book unforgivable to Soviet censors was Grossman’s daring choice to portray Stalinism and Nazism not as ideological opposites, but as terrifying reflections of one another. Both are regimes built upon fear, conformity, and the crushing of individual freedom. Few books convey so powerfully both the scale of historical horror and the stubborn endurance of human dignity.

Life… show more.

The title of this book really intrigued me. That, and the fact that the author had died very shortly after completing the novel, requesting her friend to see it through its journey, meant I felt compelled to read it.

The other hook for me was that the story is set in Guernsey, an island I have visited and where I was aware there had been a great deal of deprivation in WWII. I wasn’t disappointed. I loved the wit, the cast of wonderful characters, and the story that developed from a chance correspondence.

Like my novel, 22 Britannia Road sheds light on refugees in England, starting after the war when Janusz and Silvana are reunited after six years’ separation. The narrative alternates between flashbacks to the wartime traumas they each endured, and the “present” story of their struggles to rebuild their lives. When Poland is invaded, Janusz joins the underground army and makes his way to France and finally England with the anti-Nazi forces. This mirrors the story of two characters in my own novel, based on my grandfather and uncle. Silvana meanwhile escapes into the forest to hide with her infant son. When she and Janusz meet up after the war, theirs is no glossy romantic reunion; they barely know each other and both harbor secrets that must eventually come to light. 

I am fascinated by stories that encapsulate a whole life, usually from the perspective of a character looking back, assessing, wondering, and coming to terms with all that has transpired, both personally and globally. I am particularly fascinated by multi-dimensional female characters.

I was taken from page one by how well this story transitioned through different perspectives to offer a kaleidoscopic view of a life lived by a strong, unapologetic, complicated woman. 

I love this book because it breathes WWII in a way I’ve never read. This book is a story about the siege of Leningrad. I loved the imagery captured by a curator of the Hermitage, skillfully interwoven with a back story in the United States.

As the Hermitage is dismantled in anticipation of the German bombs, the women commit the placement of the precious artwork to memory in images and story form. The tension rises with the scarcity of food and fuel and the loss of friends.

It is a love story told in imagery and heartbreak: an excellent emotional capture and an example for Sixty Blades of Grass.

Set on the island of Cephalonia during Italy’s occupation of Greece, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin explores the relationship between occupier and occupied and the enduring strength of the human spirit.

When Italy surrenders to the Allies, the Germans occupy the island, and the Italian forces must choose to fight or to resist. In the middle of these grand politics, an Italian captain, Corelli, has fallen in love with a Greek woman, Pelagia, the daughter of the local town doctor.

At its heart, the book is about the fundamental humanity of love and its power to transform people for good or ill. A subsequent film adaptation ignores the novel’s uglier episodes, brightening the story with the incandescent beauty of Penélope Cruz and a happy ending for the romantics in the audience that is far less poignant than the book’s denouement.

Few novels examine the resistance of ordinary, unarmed civilians against occupation. Robert Crichton’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria is one of those books.

After the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, German troops occupy the (fictional) village of Santa Vittoria, distinguished only for its wine. The Germans are there to steal it. In the face of losing their wine, their livelihood, and their dignity, the villagers—usually fractious and commonplace—discover unity and extraordinary courage to resist. Hiding the wine, they confront the Germans with a stalwart moral courage.

Crichton’s novel explores both the humor and horror of life at war and the potential of the human spirit. The result is both deeply entertaining and emotionally stirring. Its celebrated film adaptation starring Anthony Quinn helped preserve the story’s legacy, but the novel itself remains one of the great overlooked treasures of wartime fiction.

Set in a world of “faded women” and “ragged boys” where “the price of human flesh was slumping from day to day,” Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin is a fictionalized autobiographical account of life in Southern Italy under the occupation of American forces.

An unforgettable read due to its relentless moral ambiguity, Malaparte refuses to portray anyone as innocent. Occupiers and occupied, victors and defeated, are all trapped within a world where traditional ideas of honor and civilization have disintegrated. His famous dedication to the “brave, good, and humble” American soldiers “who died in vain in the cause of European freedom” drips with ambiguity. Is he conveying sincere gratitude, bitter irony, or both simultaneously? The novel never provides easy answers.

At times grotesque, even hallucinatory, The Skin contains scenes so strange and horrifying they linger long after reading: banquets amid starvation, children transformed into commodities, entire social classes reduced to scavenging… show more.

Frantisek Moravec was the Head of Czechoslovak Military Intelligence before and during the Second World War, when he was also my grandfather’s boss. When I found out that Morovec had written a memoir, after escaping from Czechoslovakia in 1948, I scoured the internet to find it. I really didn’t expect the book to be the masterpiece that it is. Moravec recounts with fine detail, how he and his team continually used their wits and guile to stay ahead of both the Nazis and the Communists and maintain Czechoslovakia’s existence, right up until the Iron Curtain eventually descended. In particular he recounts how he oversaw Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of the infamous Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, who had been the architect of the Final Solution. This is a book that really demands fresh attention.  

With its roots in truth, this powerful novel brings us face to face with the insanity of war and how humans deal with the heartbreak of being torn from their homes, horrific deprivation, and betrayal. 

Cleverly structured and beautifully written with tenderly articulated characters, it presents a fresh eye on the Holocaust and its consequences, and had me continually asking myself how I would have endured, and what choices I would have found myself making, in that situation.