Here are 16 books that The Safekeep fans have personally recommended if you like
The Safekeep.
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I've read a lot of WWII fiction, the same genre as my two historical novels. Sometimes the books bleed together, but The Lost Letter stood out. It offers dual story lines, both interesting, and they are effortlessly blended together.
The novel tells a gentle tale with moments of excitement, especially in the 1939 timeline. The characters are complex and honorable, making me care about them. The information about philately (stamp collecting) and the artistic process of making stamps was fascinating.
The final reveal of the characters’ connections across time came after a perfect portion of suspense. I can unequivocally recommend this novel to anyone who loves WWII Jewish fiction and/or contemporary novels with a mystery about family heritage.
“A gorgeous and thrilling novel… Perfect for book clubs and fans of The Nightingale.” –PopSugar
A historical novel of love and survival inspired by real resistance workers during World War II Austria, and the mysterious love letter that connects generations of Jewish families. A heart-breaking, heart-warming read for fans of The Nightingale, Lilac Girls, and Sarah's Key.
Austria, 1938. Kristoff is a young apprentice to a master Jewish stamp engraver. When his teacher disappears during Kristallnacht, Kristoff is forced to engrave stamps for the Germans, and simultaneously works alongside Elena, his beloved teacher's fiery daughter, and with the Austrian…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
It's love, it's whimsy, it's lite sci-fi/romance, it's New York City! I love when a story is unique to the point of being oddball, and this one qualifies. A young woman meets another young woman who turns out to have been stuck in a time loop on the NYC subway since the 1970s. When they fall in love over several train rides together, can they find a way to take their relationship out of the subway tunnels, or is this an unbreakable spell? Sapphic modern romance with an urban fantasy/sci-fi twist: give it a try!
For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don't exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can't imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there's certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures.
But then, there's this gorgeous girl on the train.
Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges…
A year after taking an art history course in college, I visited the Impressionist Museum in Paris and felt I could recall all my professor’s lectures—word-for-word. It was as if the paintings were talking to me. Exhilarated by that experience of connection, I went on to get a master’s degree in art history and have since traveled the world in search of great art. As a timeless human expression, both stimulating and comforting, art gives me a profound sense of emotional satisfaction that I believe the books on my list beautifully explore.
Years ago, when I worked as an art museum lecturer, I often wandered the galleries before they opened to the public. The author recreated that magical experience for me—those exquisite moments of solitude and solace when the paintings opened up and quietly shared their mysteries.
As I read, I felt I was in the museum with the author, gazing at those works, and absorbing their timeless wisdom.
A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.
Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then…
The Everlasting Life of Charlie Wall
by
Paul Wilborn,
It’s 1985, and Ronald Armstrong, known in the magic mushroom trade as “Trip,” takes a “sober” job as a driver for a retired Tampa mobster. His boss, Charlie Wall, has survived four attempts on his life, the last one in 1955. When Charlie falls into depression, Trip rebuilds his boss’…
The contrast between the serene, almost stately structure of its sentences and paragraphs and its short chapters kept me engaged, and both undercut and bolstered the sentiment and complexity of its subject matter.
This fascinating murder mystery that is part memoir and part trial. The structure of this novel is unique and inventive. The author leads with a preface claiming that what follows is the memoir of the murderer who is standing trial for the bloody murder of three people. This is no ordinary whodunit, but rather a revealing glimpse into the lives and grievances of the inhabitants of a small Scottish highlands village in 1869. I was drawn in from page one. This novel barrels its way to the very last page.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2016 BY NEWSWEEK, NPR, THE GUARDIAN, THE TELEGRAPH, AND THE SUNDAY TIMES
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
"THOUGHT PROVOKING FICTION"-THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish farming community in 1869 leads to the arrest of seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae. There is no question that Macrae committed this terrible act. What would lead such a shy and intelligent boy down this bloody path? And will he hang for his crime?
What a send-up of the cozy British mystery! Atkinson's genius is her ability to infuse everything she writes with humor and irony. She clusters the cliches of characters (the grand dame, the greedy relatives, the vicar, the servants, the PI) and plot, and transforms them into the wildest mystery ride I've ever taken.
THE INSTANT #1 BESTSELLER (SUNDAY TIMES, UK) • The highly anticipated return of "irresistible" (New York Times) private eye Jackson Brodie in the newest installment of the bestselling series hailed as "unputdownable" by Time
“How delicious to have Jackson Brodie back, this time in a story that starts off in Agatha Christie's world but soon becomes a landscape that could only have been crafted from the pen of the incomparable Kate Atkinson.”–Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus Novels
Welcome to Rook Hall. The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.
Some of these names we know. We meet jobbing printer (and American Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the early twentieth century and the fifteenth. Others have been forgotten. We don't remember Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her…
* AN OBSERVER BEST NEW NOVELIST FOR 2024 * * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILBUR SMITH ADVENTURE WRITING PRIZE 2024 *
'A spellbinding achievement' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Poignant and often painfully comic' OBSERVER 'I gasped, laughed, and wept my way through it' KHALED HOSSEINI
Saba's father is missing, and the trail leads back to Tbilisi, Georgia.
Arriving in a city he has not seen for more than two decades, where escaped zoo animals prowl the streets and the voices of those left behind beckon him along a path of cryptic clues, Saba embarks on a quest that will lead him into the…
One of the great international writers of our time, Bei Dao, who has suffered serious health setbacks, writes one of his-- and perhaps his most-- powerful books of poems as he looks back-- much as Pound did in the Pisan Cantos-- on his life.
Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus-the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. "As a poet, I am always lost," Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life-from his time as a Young Pioneer in…
The authoritative but accessible history of the birth of modern American intelligence in World War II that treats not just one but all of the various disciplines: spies, codebreakers, saboteurs.
Told in a relatable style that focuses on actual people, it was a New Yorker "Best of 2022" selection and…
One of our most powerful contemporary poets, whose work blends the personal with the international, performance with text, Don Mee Choi explores with ferocity and imagination the politics of language, war, history, and intimacy.
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).
Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of…
