Books like Stay Where You Are And Then Leave — picked by fans

This is a historical fiction graphic novel and a time-travel story that pulled me in immediately.

The main character, Kiku, goes back in time and experiences her grandmother’s time in the Japanese Internment camps. Even though I have read several novels about this topic, the illustrations accompanying the story proved very powerful for me and led to a new level of understanding.

This story is timely and impactful and draws connections to the present. It is a reminder that history is cyclical and that displacement can happen to any group of people.

This is a book of historical fiction that I find myself reaching for again and again. (It’s a Newbery winner for a reason!)

This book is rich in language and details; I was completely immersed in the time period. Set in Kansas during the Great Depression, 12-year-old Abilene misses her father and does not understand why he left. The people of Manifest tell Abilene stories about a soldier from the Great War, and she begins to see her father’s truth and understand the pain he carries.

The characters in this book are unforgettable. Reading it, I felt a part of the town of Manifest and this loving community that helps a young girl heal.  

This incredible story about women who served in the Vietnam War has stayed with me for months.

Like all strong historical fiction, the author shines a light on the experiences of a group of people that is basically ignored in history books. In this case, it is the women who served in Vietnam. It opened my eyes to the trauma they experienced. Many of the women were nurses who served in field hospitals and operated on patients while under attack.

But the story goes further than that. This book showed me how service members—including the women—were treated when they came home and the decades it took to begin to heal.

This is a story that shows just how far-reaching the tides of war are.

Told in dual POV and spanning two continents, Werner begins his story in 1939, in Germany, and escapes with the help of his friend Dahlia and her family. He safely immigrates to Ecuador with them, but without any member of his own family.

What struck me most about this book is the friendship and love between Dahlia and Werner and how it grows over time. Dahlia’s love helps Werner through the pain of not knowing the fate of his loved ones.

I loved this book; it shows a perspective of WWII we do not often give our attention to.

Sassoon chronicled the war’s psychological, emotional, and physical landscape in several books of poetry and a three-part, partly-novelized memoir in which he cast himself as a typical well-off Englishman, George Sherston. The tale — of which Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is the second installment — follows Sassoon’s/Sherston’s evolution from a dreamy, poetic youth into a brave and loyal officer who eventually comes to publicly oppose the war. (An act that famously landed in him a psychiatric hospital, where he met a budding poet named Wilfred Owen.) 

Sassoon’s matter-of-fact depiction of life in the British trenches, with its wild and sudden swings between boredom and terror, is indispensable. His literal description of that life gradually takes on the quality of a hallucination as the reality of the war hardens in his mind and in the reader’s.

A great debut novel that slowly picks up pace as we get to know the local characters. When a young girl disappears from a fair, Casey, a female cop suffering from PTSD, is called in to pick up the trail of a spooky suspect who calls his victims Dollies. I loved the way the tensions ramp up until the book becomes unputdownable. 

Chris, a shell-shocked soldier who suffers from amnesia, returns from the front expecting life to be as he remembered. But he’s lost fifteen years of his memory and doesn’t recognise his wife Kitty, is horrified by how his cousin Jenny has aged, and longs only for Margaret, the girl he loved all those years ago. Despairing for his sanity, Kitty and Jenny summon Margaret, sure he’ll come to his senses when he sees her, only to find that he still adores her, dowdy, careworn, and poor as she is. The war is only glancingly mentioned here but its loss and damage aches between the lines. Told by Jenny, who loves Chris but starts to see Kitty in a new light, the dreadful snobbishness of the times is laid clear. The Return of the Soldier is a brief novel, romantic and witty, moving and bitter – I devoured it in one… show more.

I’ve included Ana, Jan, and María’s book on my list not because it is entirely about neutrality and war (although that theme plays a major part in the book) but because it pushed me to appreciate the effects of the First World War at a more global level. 

The modern name of the war, of course, includes the word ‘world’ in it, but the fighting was primarily European-focused. This book shows, however, that the war had a much wider reach–influencing China, Japan, South America, Mexico, and Africa, amongst other places. For example, the book shows that there was a clash of Empires in Africa–between neutral Portugal and belligerent Germany; and in neutral Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, societies were split down the middle between the rival camps supporting the Allies and the Germans.

I found the book to be a really important demonstration that we need to think differently about wars–the… show more.

Charles Bean’s epic volumes were pioneering, illuminating, thorough, deeply researched and far superior to equivalent official histories produced by other nations involved in the conflict.

Although Bean’s books were written long ago — between 1921 and 1942 — they are still the starting point for any credible project concerning itself with what the AIF did in battle. And he edited various volumes in the Official History series compiled by other writers as well, including a book about the home front during the war.

Bean was remarkable. His Official History, and the records and research materials underpinning it, have been crucial in so much of my work—not only my lost generation multi-biographies, and also my books on Pompey Elliott and Will Dyson, but many other research projects as well.

This book is the embodiment of great storytelling. Guy Johnson takes us on a journey that is profound and addicting.

The characters are beautifully constructed against a backdrop of historical fiction, adventure, and romance. They are flawed, and you find yourself rooting for them at every turn. This is the first book I read that taught me how to better push the constraints of my own writing and to simply write what might feel personal but is also necessary.

Johnson was also the first author I ever reached out to, to say how much the book meant to me and he responded with the most engaging words of encouragement and advice for my own stories.

I’d highly recommend this book for anyone looking to escape in the pages of an epic tale that reads as if it is on the big screen. It’s masterfully written and makes for a soul-searing… show more.