Books like Waltraud — picked by fans

The first of Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series is just a great story. One reason I read is to explore places, and one place I’m always happy to return to is Shanghai.

This book contains events and characters that can only be found in China, and yet the story itself is pure genre, a police procedural centered on a detective who really wishes he were a poet. 

Without the setting, it’s a great read. With the setting, it’s a chance to explore China.

Here is another book about strong women who supported each other as they served in battle, not as soldiers, but as nurses.

Reading The Women, I got to experience the evacuation hospitals designed to provide rapid trauma care near combat zones. The war-torn love represented in these pages is both platonic and romantic.

This is not a YA novel, but it is a very accessible read, and it raises important ethical questions. What makes a good war, exactly?

I enjoyed this memoir, lived by a solo female traveler exploring the former Soviet states. Her journey, driven by a search for meaning after profound loss, was inspiring. Many people are unfamiliar with the "Five Stans," better known as the Silk Road.

This book brought the region to life, highlighting its rich history and culture while detailing the challenges of securing visas and navigating remote areas. Her perseverance and vivid storytelling kept me turning the pages, and I now plan to visit the region next year.

I was fascinated by a book that skillfully weaves two eras together: the Gilded Age of the early 20th century and today’s elite social circles.

Despite the century between them, the characters' interactions and ambitions felt strikingly similar. Having explored Georgetown many times during visits to Washington, D.C., I’ve come to appreciate its unique blend of history and human intrigue. The author captures this beautifully, adding a compelling murder mystery to the mix.

Fatherland was the first book I read by Robert Harris and from then on, I’ve read all his books except his latest publication.

The novel is an alternative history narrative, the plot a murder mystery set in Nazi Germany in the 1950s. Yes, you read that right. What if Hitler won World War 2? The allies have negotiated a treaty with Hitler and the world is a very different place.

The main character, Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, investigates the death of an old man and as he delves into the murder, he discovers a conspiracy that involves the Gestapo.

I’ve recommended this book to friends and colleagues and all have enjoyed the story. While the setting is more contemporary than the other four titles, this is definitely worth reading.

I struggled to grasp life, culture, and thinking in Nazi Germany until I read this book. It helps average Americans, like me, understand the appeal of the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust's acceptance in Germany, and Hitler's messianic allure.

This 16-year-old German's memoir was compelling, engrossing, and a useful reference for me. Because it challenges the conventional American view of World War II, the book will be difficult to find.

This is not a full biography – the biography Steinert wrote later in her career is not available in English – but many of the ideas in Steinert’s biography can also be found in this earlier work, which has faded into posterity slightly but can be read with great profit. Here, Steinert is concerned to give texture to a hitherto often two-dimensional image of German society and its attitudes to Hitler’s War. The result is an interesting, differentiated account of public opinion in Nazi Germany. In many respects, it was pioneering and opened up questions surrounding the relationship between state and society that other historians went on to explore further in the 1980s. Steinert’s Francophone background, and perhaps the fact that she was a female writer working in a profession that was then very male-dominated, probably account for the fact that her work is less well-known in the English-speaking world… show more.

There are dozens of excellent books about Germany and Germans in the wake of defeat – I could mention Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich, or R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane – but Douglas Botting’s book is by far the most engaging history of the subject that I’ve ever read. It was written in the 1980s, so it is not quite as up-to-date as the more recent histories, but what it lacks in cutting-edge research it more than makes up for in narrative immediacy. It is impossible not to be moved by Botting’s descriptions of postwar chaos, of orphans hiding in the ruins, of lawlessness, starvation, desperation and retribution. An absolute classic.

Giles Milton is an extraordinary historian whose history books read like novels. Wolfram tells the story of a young German soldier who was only nine years old when Hitler came to power, raised by free-thinking parents who were not Nazi supporters, his formative years living under the most brutal regimes in history. This book explores a subject this is often ignored, ordinary German people trying to live normal, decent lives and who suffered the consequences of Hitler’s war. "I’d rather be anywhere else in the world," Wolfram writes to his parents from the fighting in Ukraine in 1942. This is a story of a decent young man caught up in the German war machine, and it is a reminder that people on all sides of the war suffered. 

I turn to this book to remind myself how good economic history should be written: by foregrounding the political stakes and by angling for compelling prose. In Tooze’s telling, when Nazi ideological rage met the grim realities of a global Depression, the result was the lethal gamble to conquer Germany’s way out of isolation.

It’s so instructive to watch Tooze adroitly move between narrative registers—absorbing, emphatic, mordant, even humorous—as he tackles this hair-raising topic. The thorniest subjects—foreign exchange controls and machine tools, forced labor, and racial war—come to life to awesome and awful effect.