81 Books like The Vanishing of Class 3B

This is a 750+ page book and a tour de force. I have profound sympathy for the Jewish people, and the horrors they endured under Nazi rule. None of the things I have suffered in my life, including living with a violent alcoholic father, came even close to the fears and degradation experienced by the people in this book. My own survival techniques included hiding and avoidance of anything that would trigger my father’s anger. As the eldest, I also tried to shield my younger siblings. Thus, I was as unobtrusive as possible, a survival technique minorities have used for centuries.

This story begins in 1937 with a young Hungarian Jewish man who goes to Paris to study architecture. Asked to deliver a letter to a woman’s nephew, he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient and eventually, despite her own dark secrets, they fall in love. As… show more.

As an infantry veteran, I felt especially drawn to the daughter’s loyalty and love of her dad; I shared her passion for exploring his diaries and traveling to the places in Hungary he described when his bomber was shot down in WWII.

I was thrilled at each stage of the daughter’s search for her dad near Budapest, and I tensed as she tried to decide which locals were on her side and which were out to deceive or harm her. I loved her passion to find the woman who had saved her dad’s life and I marveled at the wonders and charm of the two halves of the city, split by the Danube.

This book jumped out at me at a bookstore one day, and I loved it so deeply that I sought out the author when I learned he lived nearly and we became good friends.

Rubinstein stumbled upon a true crime story most reporters only dream of – that of hard-drinking third-string Hungarian hockey goalie Attila Ambrus, who took up bank robbing and triggered the largest manhunt in post-communist Eastern European history – and then was smart enough to let the story tell itself, bit by incredible bit.

The result is a wild ride through the chaos of post-Cold War Hungary with a rambunctious antihero for whom you can’t help but root.

Koosje is an incredible art educator, and I was so excited to see she had created a book. This book is super thick and juicy. She shares her sketches from her life, along with exercises and inspiration on how to do the same.

I have followed Koosje for many years, and I love her lighthearted “anyone can do it” approach to teaching and inspiring others to keep a sketchbook of their life. I often return to this book to look through Koosje’s sketches and remind myself of both the value and pure joy sketching your life can bring.

This novel shocked and even horrified me at first with its graphic description of a woman’s sexual fantasies. What has this to do with the horrors that are to follow? What is the relevance to the Holocaust of Freud’s attempt to treat this disturbed woman? The novel created huge controversy on its publication, and it took me several readings to understand what the author was suggesting–at least, what I think he meant because nothing is spelled out for the reader.

This is the heartbreaking story of a young woman and her small son caught up in the horror of what the Nazis did in Ukraine, and what I think D. M. Thomas is doing in the most inventive and daring manner is to show how deeply embedded in the psyche of Europe is the wickedness, the psychological sickness, that led to the Holocaust. I’m usually uneasy with the supernatural in… show more.

Josef Roth is now recognized as one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. As a historian myself, I was entranced by reading it by the way in which the book catches the vast temporal arc of the transformation and then fall of a society that had for centuries been a major force in European history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now forgotten, this was the world of Vienna’s great resplendence, then fall.

The story is told through the generational story of one family, the von Trottas. Impending loss is conveyed alongside great affection as a whole world is lost in the disasters of the First World War. The book was first published in English in 1933. In the words of another of Josef Roth’s books, “I was there,” which he was.

For those who are interested in Central European history – Hungary then engulfed what is today Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, a part of Romania, and a chunk of Serbia – in the formative period of the modern world.

The collection of essays discusses US foreign policy, nuclear politics, and the Cold War. My favorite is Trachtenberg’s critical reassessment of the origins of the First World War, a destructive conflict no one wanted to happen but still walked into. 

It is about the clash of empires, Christian and Islamic, of civilizations, and of course, war machines. Author has single-handedly rewritten the history of this battleground between the Habsburgs, Hungarians, and Turks on the basis of primary sources from many archives in the region.

His book is a fascinating synthesis of international, economic, and cultural history for the reader who time to immerse in history.

This is a comfort read I come back to again and again. It’s a historical fantasy filled with political intrigue and with multiple overlapping storylines, and I revel in the rich historical detail of 18th-century Austria. But the heart of the novel is the romance between timid young widow Charlotte von Steinbeck and charismatic castrato Carlo Morelli. Both outsiders in their own ways, they’re brought together by a shared appreciation of music, and their relationship gives both of them the courage to push back against the narrow expectations imposed on them by society.

Kristóf (1935-2011) was a Hungarian writer who fled to Switzerland during the war and wrote in French.

The Notebook (the first in the trilogy) is currently number one on my list of all-time favourites. It has all the elements of storytelling that I love: deep, psychological insight into the human heart; adroit use of archetypes, which give the book a timeless, folkloric feel; concision (no waffling) and a poetic, pared-back language that creates a sense of startling immediacy.

Kristóf writes about World War II through the eyes of two young brothers in a Nazi-occupied country (unnamed), and she shocks us awake not through sensationalised violence but through matter-of-fact narration.

It reads like a cross-between dramatic monologue and biblical parable – she stretches the novel form and opens up new possibilities for writing. 

Amateur sleuths tend to be drawn from the professional or upper classes—Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, even my own Hon Cressida Fawcett—so it’s refreshing to solve cases with Lena Szarka, a Hungarian cleaner who has a clear moral compass and a way of finding out exactly what’s lurking in the dirty laundry—both literal and metaphorical. Headstrong, big of heart, and desperate to solve the death of her friend, Lena can spot a smudgy fingerprint at fifty paces. This book is the first in a limited series and well worth settling down with—just put a coaster under your mug and pick up your own biscuit crumbs, else Lena might have a word…