100 Books Like The Kommandant's Girl

I've loved the past since I was a kid. I dug up ancient artifacts in Greece, followed paths to abandoned sites, and read a lot. By the time I went to university I knew I would do history. How did I know? When I wrote, the rest of the world disappeared, and so did time. At dawn, as a university student in Montreal, I would stub out my last cigarette and visit the nearby diner, where the owner gave me extra portions of Salisbury steak. And then, I just went on to three more universities on two continents and became a Russian specialist. Now I’m also a Greek specialist. It’s been hard to visit Russia and I needed a change.

In my teens, I read a book by Charles Berlitz titled Atlantis: the lost continent. I was enthralled and fascinated about this lost race of people, who were technically and sophisticated advance society and on one fateful day, vanished. My appetite for Greek mythology and ancient history grew from there, and I wanted to learn more about various ancient cultures and their mythologies. I eventually studied ancient history and continue my education as new archaeological discoveries and advancements are made. It wasn’t until a trip to Europe and seeing the Roman Forum and Colosseum, that I was inspired to write and combine my love for mythology and ancient history into historical fiction fantasy.

Even though I’m an engineer and accountant by education, I love to write and growing up, I read many historical fiction and murder mysteries. History spanning from the Victorian Era until the mid-twentieth century has always fascinated me, and I’ve studied various events from that period. Therefore, I wrote A Bloody Hot Summer, a crime novel using some historical events as a background. The interwar years were the heyday of crime fiction, and that is why I set my novel during that period. While researching, I get to expand my knowledge regarding history, culture, art, language, and values of those times, which I add to the novel.

I’m someone who has one of the best jobs in the world – I’m an associate professor of history. I get paid to learn and to share what I learn with my students. I am super passionate about my work, both teaching and research. As for my research, I’m a historian of Nazi Germany.

During my 45 years of practicing law, I've learned that everyone has flaws, but we all still struggle to be recognized and accepted. I always ask my law clients why things have gone sideways because understanding the personalities involved and why they are in conflict is essential. This depth of understanding is equally necessary in the process of writing believable fiction. Characters and their conflicts must resonate with the reader. For me, as a writer, this is the essential challenge for writing good fiction. I can have imaginary conversations with any of my characters because they become very real personalities in my mind.

My name is Jenny Harrison and my writing career started in 1997 in South Africa with Debbie's Story, which to my astonishment, became a bestseller. Thinking this was going to be an easy route to fame and fortune, I continued writing after migrating to New Zealand. Alas, the road to a bestseller is rife with disappointment but that didn't stop me from writing a bunch of paranormal and humorous novels. Circumstances led me to writing about families caught up in World War II. I don’t write about battles or generals, I write about ordinary people who face the unimagined cost of war and survive.

I’m drawn to characters who are stuck between two worlds and in over their heads and doomed to fail, but they stick with it anyway. My novels also tend to include overlooked historical themes from the WWII and Cold War eras, often involving espionage or crime. I have an MA in history, so I like researching and using historical detail to dramatize the story. I’ve also been a Fulbright Fellow, a fiction editor, and a translator of German fiction. The books on this list all include the type of underdogs that I love—and inspired my work. 

After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.

After writing the Dilemma, I was struck by how many readers’ feedback posed this question, What would I have done? In the process of writing the book, whilst I created the story around this one particular big fat problem, I little realised how it would resonate with so many, and also have such divided – and deeply personal responses. I’ve since become increasingly fascinated by the many ‘sliding door’ moments we experience in our lives requiring split-second decisions which may (in retrospect) have been ill-considered but by then it’s too late to ‘wind back time.’ All we can do is learn to live with consequences, however damaging they may be. 

I am an author, poet, and visual artist. These interests converge in my approach to literature. I think that visual and psychological descriptions of environments and circumstances are essential to enlivening the narrative and setting its tone. Often in modern literature this is diluted in favor of straightforward accounts. I believe that a story is never told with any complete objectivity but has a psychological context that must be highlighted. In addition, vivid visual descriptions greatly assist the reader in inhabiting the world of the story as seen from the characters’ points of view.