Books like The Secret of Santa Vittoria

“I ask for freedom for my book.” This was the plea the Ukrainian-Jewish writer and war correspondent Vassily Grossman sent to Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the manuscript of his novel, Life and Fate, was confiscated by the KGB.

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate (in the tradition of Tolstoy) follows an enormous cast of soldiers, scientists, prisoners, bureaucrats, mothers, and children whose lives intersect as Grossman moves seamlessly from freezing trenches and shattered apartment blocks to extermination camps, interrogation rooms, and laboratories haunted by political fear.

What made the book unforgivable to Soviet censors was Grossman’s daring choice to portray Stalinism and Nazism not as ideological opposites, but as terrifying reflections of one another. Both are regimes built upon fear, conformity, and the crushing of individual freedom. Few books convey so powerfully both the scale of historical horror and the stubborn endurance of human dignity.

Life… show more.

Laurent Binet’s debut novel of “metafiction” draws its title from the chilling Nazi saying, “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich” (Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich), a reference to Reinhard Heydrich, an architect of the Holocaust and one of the most terrifying figures in the Third Reich.

Known as “The Blond Beast,” Heydrich governed occupied Prague through terror, executions, and mass repression. His assassination by Czech resistance fighters in 1942 forms the heart of the novel.

Binet approaches this story in an entirely original way. Rather than hiding behind an omniscient narrator, he constantly steps into the narrative himself, revealing his anxieties, obsessions, research struggles, and doubts about how we write historical fiction. The result is a daring blend of thriller, memoir, history, and philosophical inquiry. The novel is gripping, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, not only exploring the past but also how we write about it.

Set on the island of Cephalonia during Italy’s occupation of Greece, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin explores the relationship between occupier and occupied and the enduring strength of the human spirit.

When Italy surrenders to the Allies, the Germans occupy the island, and the Italian forces must choose to fight or to resist. In the middle of these grand politics, an Italian captain, Corelli, has fallen in love with a Greek woman, Pelagia, the daughter of the local town doctor.

At its heart, the book is about the fundamental humanity of love and its power to transform people for good or ill. A subsequent film adaptation ignores the novel’s uglier episodes, brightening the story with the incandescent beauty of Penélope Cruz and a happy ending for the romantics in the audience that is far less poignant than the book’s denouement.

Set in a world of “faded women” and “ragged boys” where “the price of human flesh was slumping from day to day,” Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin is a fictionalized autobiographical account of life in Southern Italy under the occupation of American forces.

An unforgettable read due to its relentless moral ambiguity, Malaparte refuses to portray anyone as innocent. Occupiers and occupied, victors and defeated, are all trapped within a world where traditional ideas of honor and civilization have disintegrated. His famous dedication to the “brave, good, and humble” American soldiers “who died in vain in the cause of European freedom” drips with ambiguity. Is he conveying sincere gratitude, bitter irony, or both simultaneously? The novel never provides easy answers.

At times grotesque, even hallucinatory, The Skin contains scenes so strange and horrifying they linger long after reading: banquets amid starvation, children transformed into commodities, entire social classes reduced to scavenging… show more.

Pressburger is better known as half of the film duo Powell and Pressburger, but The Glass Pearls shows he missed a career when he went into film. 

Karl Braun, the protagonist of this book, is an escaped Nazi living in London some years after the end of World War II. He attempts to have a life, but lives in constant fear of being found and rounded up (yes, the book is aware of this irony). 

The “quiet cruelty” comes from the fact that, like it or not, Pressburger’s wonderful ability at portraying Braun’s interior and his fear make the reader invest in him. 

You end the novel troubled to discover that you have sympathized with – even wished for the escape of – a Nazi.

If you like intrigue, then welcome to Venice in 1938. This novel features a likable heroine in search of the solution to a mystery contained in a sketchbook. It’s full of art—both real and metaphorical. Set against the backdrop of impending war, this one is full of courage and heart.

This was Calvino’s first novel when he was just in his early twenties, and long before he became known for his explorations of fantasy, fable, and magical realism.

He tells the story of a cobbler’s apprentice in a Ligurian town who becomes involved with a band of partisans during WWII. This brotherhood, who take on assumed identities by day and fight for Italy’s freedom up in the mountains by night, provides a story of second family for the protagonist, Pin, as he comes of age during a tumultuous time.

I love how we see the flickerings of who Calvino will become as a writer with this early foray into realism.

I have read several of Angela Petch’s excellent novels, all set in Tuscany. I lived in Tuscany for two years, and her descriptions not only of the countryside but also the characters that inhabit this special part of the world are spot on. This novel kept my interest, was well-plotted, and a real pleasure to read. Her research into the wartime period is well done, and I love the details about how people lived back then. It really is another world. How our modern world integrates with it, and what we can learn from it, is something I feel she explores really well, by introducing the past to the present through her characters. 

The bravery and sacrifice of women in the Second World War is repeated in several European countries as families struggle to fight back and survive simultaneously. The novel spans over two decades as the author brings to life a young woman’s fight to survive and protect everything she loves. Although trapped in a turbulent time, the importance that rural Italian midwives during unimaginable circumstances is revealed in a touching and emotional manner. Under the Light of the Italian Moon shines a light on bravery, sacrifice, and humanity.

Among the greatest family memoirs of all time. Novelist, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) grew up in a big family in Turin between the wars. Her Jewish father was a famous and famously irascible scientist, her mother a charmer from the well-to-do bourgeoisie. The last of five, Natalia gives a sparkling picture of the loves, friendships and conflicts between her older brothers and sisters as Fascist Italy drifted toward war. Impossible not to laugh and cry, while at the same time getting a sense of the deeper forces driving Italian life.