Here are 100 books that Lore fans have personally recommended if you like
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Like some other things I’ve been lucky enough to have published, The Flying Dutchman is a short work I chiseled out of a longer one. An updating of the classic romantic legend, it’s the story of a young woman visited by a time-traveling pop star seeking the one woman he can love. The novella form—not novel, not short story—seemed to work best for it. It’s been the right shape for some of the most famous stories of all time, from Heart of Darkness to To Kill a Mockingbird and beyond.
I’ve traveled through time myself to choose some other favorite novellas that meaningfully capture a period and place.
The Scottish author Muriel Spark’s specialty was short, mordant, corrosive novels, the best known being, of course, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This one, published in 1970, was among her most striking.
A repressed woman’s vacation during the free-loving sixties turns out to be a date with death she may have initiated: the question lingers after you finish.
It became a flawed yet fascinating 1974 film with Elizabeth Taylor at her most—literally and figuratively—exposed.
Driven mad by an office job, Lise flies south on holiday - in search of passionate adventure and sex. In this metaphysical shocker, infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in the unnamed southern city that is her final destination.
Award-winning writer Laurence Klavan's newest collection of stories features twenty darkly comic and largely speculative tales.
People deal with aging parents, a world out of kilter, and their own arrested development today and in the near future, as Klavan weaves together threads of humanity and strangeness to dizzying and heartfelt…
Like some other things I’ve been lucky enough to have published, The Flying Dutchman is a short work I chiseled out of a longer one. An updating of the classic romantic legend, it’s the story of a young woman visited by a time-traveling pop star seeking the one woman he can love. The novella form—not novel, not short story—seemed to work best for it. It’s been the right shape for some of the most famous stories of all time, from Heart of Darkness to To Kill a Mockingbird and beyond.
I’ve traveled through time myself to choose some other favorite novellas that meaningfully capture a period and place.
One of my favorite novels of any length, Nathanael West’s short 1939 classic is at the very least the most disturbing portrait of Golden Age Hollywood and its hangers-on ever written—hideous, poignant, horribly funny.
West himself wrote scripts for B-movies in the thirties. His death at thirty-three in a car crash was perhaps, in its awful and infuriating ridiculousness, fitting. And it was the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died.
Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the "Best 100 English-language novels" by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song "Day of the Locusts" in homage and Matt Groening's Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes - actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles. But it's the…
Like some other things I’ve been lucky enough to have published, The Flying Dutchman is a short work I chiseled out of a longer one. An updating of the classic romantic legend, it’s the story of a young woman visited by a time-traveling pop star seeking the one woman he can love. The novella form—not novel, not short story—seemed to work best for it. It’s been the right shape for some of the most famous stories of all time, from Heart of Darkness to To Kill a Mockingbird and beyond.
I’ve traveled through time myself to choose some other favorite novellas that meaningfully capture a period and place.
Mariette Navarro’s 2025 work is part of an interesting recent sub-genre of austere European novellas set in an unspecified, unnerving near-future.
Coping with her father’s dementia, a female ship’s captain allows her male crew an unusual naked night swim. Afterwards, she realizes there’s a new, unregistered man aboard.
Ultramarine is absorbing, entranced, and psychologically rich; refreshing among current fiction, its ambiguity requires as much dream analysis as literary interpretation. It’s been superbly translated by Eve Hill-Agnus.
The metaphysically disorienting tale of a captain who loses control of her thinking—and her crew—aboard a cargo ship in the Atlantic.
A female captain in a male-dominated field, the unnamed narrator of Ultramarine has secured her success through strict adherence to protocol; she now manages a crew of twenty men and helms her own vessel. Uncharacteristically, one day, she allows her crew to cut the engines and swim in the deep open water. Returning from this moment of leisure, the crew of mariners no longer totals twenty men: now, they are twenty-one.
Award-winning writer Laurence Klavan's newest collection of stories features twenty darkly comic and largely speculative tales.
People deal with aging parents, a world out of kilter, and their own arrested development today and in the near future, as Klavan weaves together threads of humanity and strangeness to dizzying and heartfelt…
Like some other things I’ve been lucky enough to have published, The Flying Dutchman is a short work I chiseled out of a longer one. An updating of the classic romantic legend, it’s the story of a young woman visited by a time-traveling pop star seeking the one woman he can love. The novella form—not novel, not short story—seemed to work best for it. It’s been the right shape for some of the most famous stories of all time, from Heart of Darkness to To Kill a Mockingbird and beyond.
I’ve traveled through time myself to choose some other favorite novellas that meaningfully capture a period and place.
Speaking of psychoanalysis, like much of Stefan Zweig’s work, Fear was written at the dawn of the Freudian era, in 1913 (though it wasn’t published until 1920).
A married upper-class woman is blackmailed by the working-class girlfriend of her lover, and while the tale of her panic is sometimes just an illustration of the then-new concept of the subconscious, it’s riveting anyway.
In the fifties, it became the closest Roberto Rossellini ever came to making a film noir, with Ingrid Bergman.
A bourgeois housewife's affair is discovered, and a blackmailer turns her comfortable life into a nightmare of apprehension
Finding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother tedious after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist. Her lover's former mistress begins blackmailing her, threatening to give her secret away to her husband, meanwhile her husband seems to offer her numerous opportunities to confess and be forgiven. Irene is soon in the grip of agonizing fear. Written in the spring of 1913, and first published in 1920,…
Surprisingly little has been written about the postwar Occupation of Germany by the US, UK, France, and USSR. Yet it was a crucial and colorful, one might say lurid, interval in recent history. Berlin, which is the setting of my novel, The Living and the Lost, was a latter day Wild West where drunken soldiers brawled; the desperate preyed on the unsuspecting; spies plied their trade; werewolves, as unrepentant Nazis were called, schemed to rise again; black markets peddled everything from drugs to sex; and forbidden fraternization between American G.Is and Frauleins was rampant. I did a great deal of research on the period and place. Here are five books that bring the world stunningly to life.
Out of Shelter, David Lodge's first novel, is a lighter take on the Occupation in its later years. This autobiographical coming-of-age story, which he had trouble getting published, is a tale of a young British boy’s summer-long visit to his sister who’s working for the Americans in Germany. His awakening from a cossetted English childhood of rigid rules and postwar scarcity to a wider world of less certain moralities and astonishing American abundance is at once touching, funny, and written with Lodge’s usual grace and wit.
Traveling from England, where rationing is in effect, Timothy Young visits Heidelberg where his sister Kath, who works for the American army, enjoys a life of plenty.
Since I first began to study the events of the Holocaust in 1991, I became deeply engaged and committed to trying to understand why individuals engaged in the abuse and murder of their neighbors, fellow countrymen, and those deemed racially or politically inferior. In exploring this question, I drew in part on my own military experience to think about how a warped organizational culture and corrupted leadership emerged in Nazi Germany in which state-sponsored propaganda and ideological socialization combined to pervert existing moral and ethical norms and led many within the SS, police, and the German military to engage in genocide.
Before being drafted into the German Army in 1941, Willy Peter Reese was a bank clerk who spent his time engaged in reading German literature and attempting to become a writer in his own right.
The memoir is a compilation of his journal entries as he reflected on his transition from civilian to soldier. Originally published in German, Reese’s journal demonstrates the way in which a relatively naïve and carefree intellectual became involved in the Nazi war of annihilation in the Soviet Union.
The transformation from a bookish, sensitive, and brooding teenager into a soldier who lost empathy for the people suffering under German occupation demonstrates how some German youth became actors and accomplices in the Nazi regime’s crimes.
"A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-44" is the haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead. Bearing witness to-and participating in-the atrocities of war, Reese recorded his reflections in his diary, leaving behind an intelligent, touching, and illuminating perspective on life on the eastern front. He documented the carnage perpetrated by both sides; the destruction that was exacerbated by the young soldiers'…
World War 2 has always interested me and my curiosity was strengthened a few years ago when my mother told me I was born illegitimate and my father had been the civil engineer building a nearby bomber airfield and a lodger with her parents. She was ashamed of what happened and lost contact with my father before I was born. Consequently, I wrote my first novel Unplanned. I then met the daughter of the Berlin mother in Abandoned in Berlin, and found itnatural to pursue this story, given what I had discovered about my own upbringing. The effort has taught me to seek to forgive but never to forget.
A true account of how the Nazis confiscated a Berlin business property belonging to a Jewish family and the actions taken to secure restitution. The story has a twist in that the claim for restitution could not be made until after 1989 because the building is located in the Soviet sector of the city.
The property was the business headquarters for a fur company and parts of it were leased. In 1937, the Victoria Insurance Company forecloses on the mortgage and transferred ownership of the building to Hitler’s railway system. The granddaughter investigates her ancestry and the way the building was lost, and then takes up the fight to obtain restitution. After several disappointments, she is successful.
I enjoyed the storyline because it is remarkably similar to what happens in my book. It provides another perspective of how the Nazis confiscated Jewish property, and only by reading books like this…
This former BBC journalist's passionate search for justice is a suspenseful confrontation with World War II history. A fascinating journey." Anne-Marie O'Connor, national bestselling author of The Lady in Gold Dina Gold grew up hearing her grandmother's tales of the glamorous life in Berlin she once led before the Nazis came to power and her dreams of recovering a huge building she claimed belonged to the family - though she had no papers to prove ownership. When the Wall fell in 1989, Dina decided to battle for restitution. When the Third Reich was defeated in 1945 the building lay in…
I’m a long-time correspondent for American media across the world. I reported on Europe and Asia for the Wall Street Journal, and on Southeast Asia for Bloomberg News. I was always fascinated by deep historical layers to be found in ancient societies like those of Europe, and the sometimes accurate clichés about European tribes and their strange customs; no European tribe is weirder than the Germans, for a long time the wildest of the continent and then the most cultured and sophisticated until they came under the spell of a certain Austrian. The twelve years that followed still rank as the most insane historical period for any nation ever.
The coming of the Third Reich in 1933 left Klemperer, a cash-strapped Jewish scholar, without his teaching job in a German university, but somehow sheltered from the worst excesses of Nazism due to his marriage to an “Aryan” German woman. His diaries are a window to the daily life of a childless middle-aged couple that observes world-shaking events from close proximity, while worrying about debts and the high costs of keeping the family car, Klemperer's most cherished possession.
A publishing sensation, the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period.
'A classic ... Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank's' SUNDAY TIMES
'I can't remember when I read a more engrossing book' Antonia Fraser
'Not dissimilar in its cumulative power to Primo Levi's, is a devastating account of man's inhumanity to man' LITERARY REVIEW
The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages at Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many…
I worked as a journalist for the BBC for nearly thirty years: my writing of espionage novels set in Europe during the Second World War goes back to 1994 when I was covering the 50th anniversary of D-Day for the BBC. I became fascinated with the human stories behind big military events and especially the British deception operation that was so crucial to the Allies’ success. This led to my first novel, The Best of Our Spies. To ensure my novels feel as authentic as possible my research means I travel around Europe and I’ve also amassed a collection of maps and guidebooks from that period.
This is another book that manages to paint a picture of what life was like in Berlin during the war. Roger Moorhouse tells some fascinating stories, such as that of Paul Ogorzow, the so-called S-Bahn Murderer. The fact that a serial killer was operating around Berlin’s railway system was a dilemma for the authorities who tried and failed to lay the blame on either Jews or Poles. Ogorzow was eventually captured convicted of the murder of eight women and of attacking thirty-seven more during 1940 and 1941. The fact he was a Nazi Party member was a deep embarrassment and didn’t help him: he was executed just days after his conviction.
Berlin was the nerve-centre of Hitler's Germany - the backdrop for the most lavish ceremonies, it was also the venue for Albert Speer's plans to forge a new 'world metropolis' and the scene of the final climactic bid to defeat Nazism. Yet while our understanding of the Holocaust is well developed, we know little about everyday life in Nazi Germany.
In this vivid and important study Roger Moorhouse portrays the German experience of the Second World War, not through an examination of grand politics, but from the viewpoint of the capital's streets and homes.He gives a flavour of life in…
Some of my first memories as a kid are of films and TV shows about World War Two; the theme tune and credits of The World At War TV series still haunt me even now. But to be honest, the bombing of Germany never gripped me as much as, say, the war in Russia, that is, until I started to read up on it. It was a revelation. Suddenly, I saw incredibly young men fighting to survive in the most hostile environment on the planet–or rather above the planet, miles above, in fact. To me, I find the war they fought alien, but at the same time so absorbing I lose myself in it.
I must admit I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book; it was too dry, too academic, and too detail-obsessed. To be honest, I found it to be all those things, and yet it was absorbing!
I came to the conclusion that I really liked it because I was either a) a geek or b) quite sad, and both are true. Anyway, what I discovered was that I liked this book exactly because it was dry and detailed.
It told me a story I hadn’t heard before and one that opened my eyes and my thinking to a hugely important aspect of the air war–the world of guns and those who crewed them, who, increasingly as the war went on, were schoolchildren.
Air raid sirens wail, searchlight beams flash across the sky, and the night is aflame with tracer fire and aerial explosions, as Allied bombers and German anti-aircraft units duel in the thundering darkness. Such "cinematic" scenes, played out with increasing frequency as World War II ground to a close, were more than mere stock material for movie melodramas. As Edward Westermann reveals, they point to a key but largely unappreciated aspect of the German war effort that has yet to get its full due.
Long the neglected stepchild in studies of World War II air campaigns, German flak or anti-aircraft…
