Books like Proud Pink Sky — picked by fans

This quiet, unsettling book was written over a decade ago but still feels so topical and urgent that it might have been published today. In a German city, dozens of African migrants living on the street stage a hunger strike for the right to work. Richard, a widowed academic in bored retirement goes to meet them, and gets involved.

I recalled my own impulses to activism and charity as a kid and now— my curiosity to understand other people's plight, compulsion to help, and perhaps guilt that, in comparison, my own problems are negligible.

Richard is motivated by morality, a search for meaning, and a desire for connection and shared action. I've been there, too, and like him, I've learned that friendships can sour and good intentions go wrong.

This isn’t an easy read, but it’s an important one. A diary by an anonymous female journalist trapped in Berlin as bombs fall and the Red Army closes in, it describes in graphic detail her struggle for survival between April and June 1945. Berlin’s women had difficult choices to make in this period, and the author records unflinchingly her decision to choose the ‘protection’ of one Russian soldier over repeated rape by multiple others. It is one of the few books that tell us about war from the perspective of civilian women, immersing us in their world and recording the impact of political leaders’ delusions of grandeur and glory on individual lives. I didn’t find this an easy book to pick up, but found it even harder to put down.

Berlin was at the centre of Nazi Europe and is invariably at the heart of my novels, including Agent in Berlin. I’m fascinated by Berlin and I try to get beyond the obvious aspects of the city and give a sense of what life was like on a daily basis.  I have chosen this book by William Shirer, an American journalist based in the city from 1934 and who only left after Pearl Harbor. The book combines the sharp observations of a journalist with an eye for fascinating detail, such as the nuanced wording of the death notices of soldiers and the impact of rationing on the population.

I have long thought that if the “Star Spangled Banner” was ever to be replaced—it shouldn’t be!—the new national anthem should be “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin in 1918 and revised in the years before World War II. I adore how author Churnin gets in all the essentials about Berlin’s path to America, fleeing hate in Russia to find a new home…and falling in love with it.

I was dazzled to learn that Berlin gave all his song royalty money to the Scouts. I think he was a great American; his song makes me love America more, and so does his story. 

Okay, I like almost anything that is set in Berlin because I lived and “worked” there during the Cold War, but Canon really brings it in this tightly woven story of Martin Keller, a hapless former convict who has been co-opted to work for the CIA in East Berlin.

From the first page, paranoia sets in, as it must on anyone working against the Communist regime of East Germany, when Keller embarks on his own agenda to save himself and, more importantly, the family he loves.

Kanon re-creates the tension of a divided Berlin while his well-drawn characters try to escape the clutches of a morally corrupt government. Kanon is simply one of the best.  

I stumbled on this novel when I was looking for something else (a common writers’ problem). It was written in 1932 and banned the next year by the Nazis and is set amongst the gangs of young men struggling to survive in a harsh and desperately impoverished Berlin. The descriptions of the hard side of the city are brilliantly drawn and the characters are so real you long for their lives to improve even when you know there is almost no hope of it. Haffner was a social worker who clearly knew Berlin’s streets well. To add to the poignancy of his writing, nothing is known about his fate beyond a summons before a Nazi tribunal in the late 1930s. After that, he disappears. I really hope his book doesn’t.

Uwe Westphal has spent many years researching and writing about the Jewish contribution to the Berlin fashion industry between 1836 - 1939.  This is a story that has never been told before. Jewish entrepreneurs invented ready-to-wear, mass-produced, fashionable clothing. By the early 1900s, Berlin was the hub of world fashion with the majority of clothing firms being Jewish-owned. In 1933 the Nazis swiftly foreclosed and “Aryanized” these businesses and their owners fled into exile or were murdered. After 1945, the now non-Jewish fashion firms, which had taken over their predecessors’ companies, enjoyed a tremendous increase in worldwide sales due to the glaring absence of their pre-war Jewish competitors. But the sophistication of the Jewish designers was gone. Today’s German fashion industry is a long way from recovering its former international status.

This book enables the reader to appreciate the immense loss of Jewish talent wrought by the Nazis. Westphal’s archival… show more.

This author offers a well-crafted history of daily life inside the Reich, a fascinating exploration of the German capital as the Nazi movement brought its citizens to their knees. Extensively researched and documented, Moorhouse vividly portrays the daily oppression and challenges faced on all societal fronts. This well-crafted study enmeshes the reader in life under totalitarian rule.

The book, set in the early 1930s, is from a fleeting period when the liberal pleasures of the German capital made it the European place to be. An English teacher of reserved social origins, Isherwood writes of the Berlin characters who enlivened his life, against the forbidding backdrop of Hitler's rise to power. Cabaret, the film adapted from the book, led Isherwood to insist his version of events was far nearer to how things were.

Although I write mostly history books and only non-fiction, I loved adventure stories as a child and these five have all stuck with me into adulthood. That must say something. The fast pace of this particular one, and its very realistic setting (1920s Berlin, peopled by some fairly tough characters), was highly unusual for children’s fiction when it was written more than 90 years ago. Because of this, I’m sure that even now most readers will have no difficulty imagining themselves filling Emil’s shoes and would want to join in with his adventures if they could. It’s properly engaging, a really great read.