Here are 100 books that The Skylarks' War fans have personally recommended if you like
The Skylarks' War.
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I like happy endings. There, I’ve said it. I love books. I’ve written more than sixty to date, and I read all the time in every genre. I also love history, and World War II is a particular passion. It was an era rich with drama, horror, and heroism, with stories begging to be told. So many of those stories, real and fictional, end in heartbreak. But the great thing about being a writer is that I can take the characters I love through hell and back, then, in the end, have them come shining through. That’s what I want as a reader, too.
Great book, with an amazing cast of characters. In 1947, Charlie St. Clair, young and pregnant, teams up with elderly, war-traumatized Eve Gardiner to find Charlie’s missing cousin Rose, and in the process, the two uncover the still-living villain who betrayed Eve’s WWI spy ring.
This dual timeline book will keep you on the edge of your seat and comes complete with a you’ll-jump-for-joy happy ending.
In an enthralling new historical novel from national bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women-a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947-are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption. 1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
Each of these novels, in their own way, forces us to confront the realities of war and power, showing how fragile humanity truly is. They’ve inspired me to reflect on how interconnected we are, especially regarding the scars of conflict. I am reminded of the John Donne poem that inspired Hemingway’s title, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)–which begins: “No man is an island, intire of its selfe; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the maine.” War doesn’t just affect the soldiers: war has its hooks in us all.
This book is one of the most haunting accounts of war I've ever read. Through the eyes of Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier, Remarque immerses you in the horrific realities of World War I. The sheer brutality of trench warfare, the disillusionment with nationalism, and the emotional devastation of losing comrades all play out in a way that feels as immediate now as it must have been when the book was first published. My grandfather fought in the First World War, and though he never spoke about it, I believe the emotional scars he carried shaped who he became. All Quiet makes me think about how those invisible wounds persist today—worldwide. War may evolve regarding weapons and strategies, but the psychological impact is chillingly consistent.
This novel isn’t just about the battlefield. It’s about the inner lives of soldiers and the way war corrupts not just bodies but minds,…
The story is told by a young 'unknown soldier' in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see all the realities of war; under fire, on patrol, waiting in the trenches, at home on leave, and in hospitals and dressing stations. Although there are vividly described incidents which remain in mind, there is no sense of adventure here, only the feeling of youth betrayed and a deceptively simple indictment of war - of any war - told for a whole generation of victims.
I’ve always loved history and historical stories, but like the majority of people, didn’t really know very much about WWI. That changed in early 2017 when I read The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara W Tuchman. I immediately fell into a vortex of further reading, resulting in my writing The War in Our Hearts at the end of that year--because although there is a lot of great non-fiction out there about WWI, there aren’t nearly as many novels that quite scratched the itch I had for fiction…so I wrote the book I wanted to read!
This is a fantastic novel about a girl soldier in Russia who joins the Women’s Battalion of Death, during the time that the Russian Revolution was beginning and morale among male soldiers was flagging. The Russian army thought the men’s morale might be boosted if girls came along and gave the men a little competition. I love the camaraderie and amazing determination of these women to do their bit for their country.
A dramatic page-turner that captures the devastating toll of war and the impact of women's struggles and solidarity, through the lens of a little-known slice of history.
In 1917, Russia is losing the war with Germany, soldiers are deserting in droves, and food shortages on the home front are pushing people to the brink of revolution. Seventeen-year-old Katya is politically conflicted, but she wants Russia to win the war. Working at a munitions factory seems like the most she can do to serve her country―until the government begins recruiting an all-female army battalion. Inspired, Katya enlists. Training with other brave…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
I’ve always loved history and historical stories, but like the majority of people, didn’t really know very much about WWI. That changed in early 2017 when I read The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara W Tuchman. I immediately fell into a vortex of further reading, resulting in my writing The War in Our Hearts at the end of that year--because although there is a lot of great non-fiction out there about WWI, there aren’t nearly as many novels that quite scratched the itch I had for fiction…so I wrote the book I wanted to read!
This book is leisurely, reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works (such as North and South or Wives and Daughters); it reads and feels like a warm summer day. It takes place in a small English town in the tense and uncertain months leading up to the war and a little beyond, featuring family dramas, romantic entanglements, spunky schoolteachers, Belgian refugees, underage recruits, life, and death, and love.
'Helen Simonson's characters enchant us, her English countryside beguiles us, and her historical intelligence keeps us at the edge of our seats.' - Annie Barrows, co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.East Sussex, 1914. It's the end of an idyllic summer and Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha in the pretty coastal town of Rye. Casting aside the recent sabre rattling over the Balkans, Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master.When Beatrice…
Having sailed the East Coast for over sixty years, from Ocracoke to Gaspe, I know that there’s nothing better than a few days of bad weather - if you`re safely at anchor in a well-protected cove. The wind in the rigging, rain drumming on the deck, the stove fired up, a mug of tea (with or without a tot of rum): add a good book, and that is pure happiness. After a hard day's sail - or just drifting along, becalmed - a good book is a sailor`s best friend.
In these two volumes, Massie shows how the naval arms race Kaiser Wilhelm undertook with his grandmother Queen Victoria led inexorably to the Great War and a century of conflict. The rise of a young power, contesting control of the seas with the established global empire: sound familiar? The stakes could not have been higher - as Churchill said of Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the British fleet: "He is the only man who could lose this war in a single afternoon." Jellicoe prevailed when that fateful afternoon came at Jutland, but Massie shows us the long drift to war that started decades before on a different afternoon: a yacht race at Cowes.
With the biographer's rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittering figures: the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz; the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow; Britain's greatest twentieth-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionized the British Navy and brought forth for the first true battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstanding, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought…
I grew up with a graveyard in my backyard: the historic Schenck-Covenhoven Graveyard in Penns Neck, New Jersey, just outside Princeton. This small square plot, filled with the 18th- and 19th-century graves of local families, served as the perfect playground for hide-and-seek and cops-and-robbers with my friends. Working as a tour guide and volunteer at Laurel Hill Cemetery for nearly thirty years, I fell in love with its rich history and its architectural and horticultural beauty. As I grow older, I have come to value cemeteries for their role as both a meeting place and a mediator between the living and the dead.
January 1901: Queen Victoria is dead and her subjects nervously await a new king and a new century. Two families—the aristocratic Colemans and middle-class Waterhouses—meet at their adjoining plots in London’s elegant Highgate Cemetery. Their five-year-old daughters form an immediate bond. The lives of the two families entwine over the next decade as they struggle with social change, betrayal, and grief. Surprisingly, Highgate offers a release from the confining decorum of their everyday lives. The two girls play among the graves with a gravedigger’s son, while adult members of their households indulge in forbidden liaisons there. Chevalier’s crisp prose creates rich character portraits and vivid historical scenes with only a few strokes. This slim novel resonated in my mind long after I finished it.
'Sex and death meet again in [a] marvellous evocation of Edwardian England' Daily Mail
The girl reminded me of my favourite chocolates, whipped hazelnut creams, and I knew just from looking at her that I wanted her for my best friend.
Queen Victoria is dead. In January 1901, the day after her passing, two very different families visit neighbouring graves in a London cemetery. The traditional Waterhouses revere the late Queen where the Colemans have a more modern outlook, but both families are appalled by the friendship that springs up between their respective daughters.
I’ve always loved horses, in real life and fiction. I guzzled up pony stories as soon as I was old enough to read, then I started writing them, tales of teenage orphans adopted by distant aunts who lived in crumbling stately piles with fields full of ponies. When I started writing fiction for a living, it stood to reason horses would feature, and three decades after one trotted into my debut novel French Relations – then galloped off into the sunset in its sequelWell Groomed- they’re still a mainstay. Of the twenty novels I’ve written, more than half have horses at their heart, including my new Comptons series.
The glorious Flambards series, starring gutsy heroine Christina, was a staple for pony-mad teenagers in the 70s and 80s and is still held in great affection by its legions of fans. It’s so full of heart and life that it’s stayed relevant and readable today. Orphaned at the turn of the twentieth century, Christina Parsons is sent to live with tyrannical, hunting-mad Uncle William and his two sons in their impoverished estate. One son, dashing thruster Mark, is thought to be a good match for Christina, but it’s his younger brother, the clever, awkward would-be aviator William who she falls for. Perhaps the most trusting and enduring love she finds, however, is that for horses, starting with the wonderful, kind Sweet Briar in this opening novel. The freedom they discover together, blasting across Flambards’ ancient turf from Uncle William’s angry bellowing, is a tour de force.
When Christina is sent to live in the grand country house, Flambards, she doesn't know what to expect. Once there, she meets two young men, Mark and Will, trying to cope with their bad-tempered father. She also discovers a passion for horse-riding and a love for life in the country. As time goes by Christina begins to embrace her new life and all the social engagements that it involves, but with both brothers vying for her attention Christina knows it's just a matter of time before she has to choose . . .
I grew up believing there was a mystery or puzzle around every corner. That guy holding a paper bag by the garbage can? Definitely a Russian spy about to make a drop. The giant house at the top of the street? For sure, haunted (or at least hiding buried treasure). My love for clue games and solving puzzles stemmed from the books and movies I loved as a child. Now, as a children’s author, I get to continue conjuring up clue games and secret spies and puzzling old houses from an ordinary world, one that with the right imagination can turn heartache and heavy things into something close to magic.
This story differs from the others on my list, as it takes place in England in the early twentieth century. Setting and time period aside, the plucky main character Tabitha along with her pet rat and fellow detective (in her mind) steal the show and our hearts. We can’t help but root for her despite all she comes up against and all who belittle her as she follows clues in her unique and endearing manner through a giant and possibly haunted estate. Nooks & Crannies does a fine job balancing humor and wit with more serious subjects such as murder and abuse, and is sure to appeal to fans of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets Clue when six children navigate a mansion full of secrets—and maybe money—in this “delightful gem” (School Library Journal, starred review) with heart.
Sweet, shy Tabitha Crum, the neglected only child of two parents straight out of a Roald Dahl book, doesn’t have a friend in the world—except for her pet mouse, Pemberley, whom she loves dearly. But on the day she receives one of six invitations to the country estate of wealthy Countess Camilla DeMoss, her life changes forever.
Upon the children’s arrival at the sprawling, possibly haunted mansion, it turns out the countess…
Narrative history isn’t about dates, kings, and queens. It’s about deeds, actions, experiences, decisions of people great and small. It’s about putting the reader in the middle of a drama and watching events unfold around them as if they were there so they can understand, observe, and perhaps ask: what would I have done? The best history writing shouldn’t just inform, but inspire you, make you feel: laugh, cry, feel angry, flinch at horrific sights, cheer the heroes, boo the villains, because history is made by ordinary people, good and bad, who possess many similar traits to the reader.
If you want one book to understand how the first month or so of World War 1 played out, there is only one place to turn. Tuchman’s book is beautifully written, with a rich tapestry of characters and events, it covers the major events in Europe in August and early September 1914. It is largely seen through the eyes of ‘great men’—the military and political leaders of the day—which makes it slightly dated by today’s standards, but the skill and humanity of the reader and the sheer scope of the narrative will keep you in their thrall.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—Newsweek
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step…
I've been drawn to the experience of women on the home front since, at the age of seven, I witnessed my grandmother’s raw, unprocessed grief at the death of her favourite brother. Later, I read accounts by women and men caught up in that war who all displayed a breathtaking degree of selflessness. This novel is my homage to them. It meant a lot to me to write it, prompting tears several times while I typed. Evocatively written about sensitive issues, I wanted to capture the emotional toll that bravery involves and to write about the characters’ experiences with empathy and love. I hope it is a book you can curl up with.
I wanted to read an authoritative book about the social, political, and historical context on the home front during World War One. I settled on this book by a senior historian at The Imperial War Museum to learn about the challenges facing civilians from an academic, learned perspective.
I enjoyed its wide lens as it focused on rationing, zeppelin bombing raids, the changing role of women, and government propaganda. I appreciated its facts and figures and while I would have welcomed more of the author’s thoughts or personality appearing on the page every now and then, I gained so much from reading it that I am including it here.
"Your country Needs YOU!" was the poster slogan that shouted out to many during World War I. And indeed, it did. As men of all ages joined the Forces and left their homes and jobs, so those left behind were forced to step up and take their place. Food shortages, rationing, the "First Blitz," and the appearance of women in the workplace all became familar. Drawing on the archives of the Imperial War Museum, author Terry Charman presents a lively portrait of life on the Home Front in World War I. Filled with absorbing first-hand accounts taken from diaries, letters,…
