Books like Under the Light of the Italian Moon — picked by fans

Have you ever read a book that grabbed you with a character challenged by circumstances you’d never considered? Imagine being blind and trying to survive WWII! I was intrigued by this essentially two-person novel set during World War II, which had a ‘cast’ of millions.

Again, the characters! Marie-Laure LaBlanc is a young blind French woman hiding in her great-uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after the Nazis invade Paris. I found Doerr’s lyrical sensory descriptions of Marie-Laure’s efforts to make her way around town as she’s pulled into the French resistance thrilling. I loved the depth of characterization when I met the second main character, Werner Pfennig, a radio repair savant, and his journey from a Nazi soldier tracking down illicit resistance radio operators to a young man repulsed by the Nazi brutalization of civilians.

The characters and intrigue pulled me through this book; mixed in with the eventual connection of… show more.

I loved that this book is about the little acts of resistance performed by ordinary people. It is not about the Maquis blowing things up and hiding in the woods. Instead, it highlights how small acts of courage, such as delivering a library book to a Jew, could endanger one’s life.

I found the book easy to read, and I could relate to the perils of the characters trying to live a normal life and maintain dignity in Nazi-occupied Paris.

This book provided an insight into WWII in Italy. It is captivating and informative.

It tells the story of Pino, a brave 17-year-old who not only spied on the Germans who occupied his homeland but also crossed the Alps many times to save Jewish people. Full of mystery and intrigue, it was hard to put down until the end.

This book has so many of my favorite elements: believable friendships among three very different women, Bletchley Park during World War II, with spies, and characters I adored: the debutante, the working-class girl, and the girl we’d now say is “on the spectrum.” I loved this book so much that I read everything Kate Quinn wrote, but this one’s still the best.

When Beth is threatened with a lobotomy, the suspense was terrifying. I kept thinking of my aunt whose existence was a family secret for years. I laughed and cried over this book and the women who helped win the War but had to keep their work a secret, even if it cost them everything and everyone they loved.

Calvino, like Perec, was an experimental novelist, interested in imposing games and rules on what he created. Here, he took the convention of the short story collection and used it to dramatise the arrival of the twentieth century into rural Italy—the machine age, but also the fascist age, and the consuming fires of the Second World War. The incremental tension that comes from time passing is a powerful reading experience.

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.

The Day of Battle was Volume Two of Rick Atkinson’s acclaimed Liberation Trilogy. While all three volumes of this series are well worth reading, Atkinson was at his best in the second volume which deals with the much-neglected campaigns of Sicily and Italy. The doyen of British military history and a veteran of the Italian campaign, the late Sir Michael Howard wrote that The Day of Battle was ‘one of the truly outstanding records of the Second World War’. I think it is too.

Set in Italy during WWII, Liliana Nicoletti becomes involved in the partisan cause to save her country from the Germans. When her family encounters an escaped POW, she learns what it means to fight the Fascists who are destroying her community and joins the resistance.  

Her mother and sisters shot, mud and blood streaming over her face, she picks up the rifle she hadn’t used in years and vows to find her father. Realistic and horrific, the first half of the tale paints a picture of courage beyond what we imagine possible and of relationships formed from the tangled threads of love and need. After the war, angst mixes with hope as Liliana and James search for the men who slaughtered innocent people. Is justice or revenge driving her?

The author drew me into the story with vivid details and kept me on the edge of my seat with twists… show more.

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.

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.