100 Books Like The Librarian of Burned Books

This book takes the often stuffy genre of historical war fiction and turns it inside out. It opens in London in 1947, when the rubble is cleared, but familiar buildings are still missing windows, and the characters feel untethered from life and from all they’ve lost.

The story moves backward three years at a time to the decisions that set them on these paths. Three queer women are at its center, their lives intersecting in the literal and metaphorical dark, trying to survive air raids, and taking care of the fallen.

I’m always attracted to novels that start in the aftermath and ask “how did we get here?” and I loved this fragmented look backwards through the war.

Stockings with seams, blood-red lipstick, smokey jazz clubs, and unbelievably strong leading ladies—okay, I just said it all in that opening sentence. This book gripped me from the beginning. I could tell from the nail-biting opening that it was going to be gritty and realistic but also revel in the elegance of the time period.

Set in the US during the Second World War, this book is part of a long, slow burn of four incredible reads that I totally devoured and absolutely loved. It's an absorbing, almost infuriating mystery that can only be solved by the love between the two leads. The character of Kathryn, in particular, will stay with me forever. 

This was an automatic read for me. E.V. Bancroft always writes a great slow burn, but the fact that this was set amongst the women pilots of the ATA in WW2 was the cherry on top.

The bravery of those women–and all despite the prejudices of the day–makes an extraordinary background to a moving love story. For me, Odette's character is beautifully crafted. This was a tale that stuck with me for a long time.

As a well-established writer of steamy but compelling sapphic romances, Emma Nichols is another auto-read on my list. This book is set in Berlin and rural France during the early 1940s, and its two main characters are studies of resilience in the face of overwhelming darkness. In the character of Johanna, Nichols examines the agony of how to be, how to love, and what to do when a good-hearted person finds themselves on the wrong side of a war simply because of their country's politics.

In the role of the oppressed and downtrodden, we meet an absolute savior–a woman who is prepared to risk everything for love and the women she holds dear. This is a difficult read at times, but ultimately a beautiful one, as love and goodness triumph at the end. 

This book represents another facet of military women, those with a double whammy: Black women. This was especially a problem during WWII, when the army still practiced segregation and initially prohibited Black women from serving overseas, unlike their white counterparts.

After pressure from groups such as the NAACP and intervention by President Roosevelt, the army formed the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion as an all-Black Women’s Army Corps unit. About 850 women served in the 6888th, which was stationed in the UK and France from January 1945 until March 1946. The unit was responsible for routing mail to about 7 million U.S. personnel who served in the European Theater of Operations.

This “double whammy” is a topic that I hope is explored more in future books!

In 2018, I went to an author reading by Liza Mundy. Deep into researching my own nonfiction book, I was fascinated as Mundy talked about interviewing women who became code breakers in World War II.

The government recruited them from top colleges and universities, looking for women who were gifted in math and music. The women were sworn to secrecy and kept their word, telling people they had been secretaries during the war. They maintained that fiction into their old age or their graves.

Mundy tracked down survivors and showed them documentation that the program had been declassified. They had been released from their vow of silence and could share their stories with her. The book is excellent.

“Lolas” is the Tagalog word for “grannies,” referring to the aged women who survived Japanese military sex slavery in WWII. Lolas’ House skillfully weaves the heartrending first-person accounts of sixteen Filipina “comfort women,” snatched away from their homes and repeatedly violated by Japanese soldiers, with the riveting narratives of M. Evelina Galang, an American writer and professor of Filipina descent, who traveled with the Lolas to the sites of their abduction, protested with them at the gates of the Japanese Embassy in Manila, and became their trusted friends in documenting their stories. Galang says she “cannot rest until the stories are told.” I feel the same way. This book gives a powerful voice to the Filipina “comfort women.” 

I loved this novel, based on the author’s mother’s life!

It made me aware of American women called Donut Dollies and their roles in WW2 following the troops as they liberated Europe. I imagined being there and how it would be for the protagonist.

An unusual and heartbreaking story. The events experienced affected the author’s mother afterward all through her life, and she died isolated and alone. I recognized how a mother was affected by war, as my mother also was traumatized.

I love when an author can blend two timelines to tell a story, particularly in historical fiction.

Transitioning back and forth to reveal how secrets and stories that happened years before still remain influential generations later. Mandy Robotham has done just that in The Secret Messenger, the story of a young woman, Luisa Belmont, who finds a old typewriter in her attic. 

Unwilling to just let it go, Mandy pursues an investigation that leads back to the dark days of World Wars 2 and uncovers a hallowing tale of bravery and betrayal that make this work of fiction as pertinent today as it would have been then.  

I originally read this book when it came out in 1990. It is about a group of young women in the Soviet Union who flew as combat pilots during World War II.

With U.S. women still prohibited from flying in combat in 1990, I was thrilled that women had already proven themselves in combat a half-century earlier. The “Night Witches” flew mostly at night, and their bombs relentlessly terrorized German ground forces invading the Russian homeland.

Many of the women were designated as aces for shooting down at least five enemy aircraft, and others were awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Although the book has been criticized in recent years for not being entirely factual, it is still a great read about these courageous women.