My father, Squadron Leader Peter Stevens MC, died in 1979, when I was 22 years old, before I'd had the chance to speak with him man-to-man about his war. I later began researching his wartime exploits, which would consume a good part of 18 years of my life. I initially had no intention of writing a book; I just wanted to find the original document that recommended him for the Military Cross. I finally located it in Britain's National Archives in 2006. Along the way, I discovered that my father had actually been born a German Jew (he had told his immediate family in Canada that he was British and Anglican), and that some 15-20 family members had been murdered in the Holocaust. Further research showed that Dad had been the ONLY German-Jewish bomber pilot in the RAF, and that he had been the object of a country-wide manhunt by the British Police as a possible enemy spy.
Tommy Calnan was as brave as they come. Flying an unarmed Spitfire of the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, Calnan's plane was hit by flak and set afire. He bailed out, but was badly burned in the process. Barely surviving his wounds, including third-degree burns to his face and hands, Calnan spent several months recovering in a German hospital. One might think that he had done enough for the Allied cause, but despite his face being badly scarred, Calnan became a serial escaper of great courage and determination.
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.
Although my novel is set mainly on the home front, it starts in no man’s land and the trenches and returns to the front a few more times to demonstrate how close the links were between the home and war fronts. I wanted these passages to be realistic and needed facts, details, and knowledge from which to write.
I read John Lewis-Stempel’s meticulously researched book because it focuses on the experiences of Subalterns—young men who were made officers while they were often still at school. I found it moving, harrowing, and shocking—a book that stayed with me because it showed the impossibility of performing that role and surviving more than a few weeks. It proved invaluable for the first chapter of the book which is entitled The Subaltern.
The extraordinary story of British junior officers in the First World War, who led their men out of the trenches and faced a life expectancy of six weeks.
During the Great War, many boys went straight from the classroom to the most dangerous job in the world - that of junior officer on the Western Front. Although desperately aware of how many of their predecessors had fallen before them, nearly all stepped forward, unflinchingly, to do their duty. The average life expectancy of a subaltern in the trenches was a mere six weeks.
In this remarkable book, John Lewis-Stempel focuses…
When I learned that a friend, at forty, discovered the father he thought was his dad wasn’t, I was both fascinated and devastated for him. It made me wonder why families kept secrets and believed it was the best choice. I became curious about how such news affected those lied to. Over time, I found others with similar revelations, sparking personal journeys of self-discovery. These stories, shared without me asking, led to my debut novel and shaped my writing. While my own family seems secret-free, I’m drawn to writing about characters burdened with hidden truths, exploring how these secrets affect identity, trust, and relationships.
I love historical fiction with mystery and long-held secrets centered around a piece of art, and where the story teaches me something I never learned in school. Harmel does it beautifully in this evocative novel with the POW internment camps in Florida during WWII.
Hooked on page one, I was captured by the protagonist’s hunger for roots and family, and kept turning pages to uncover the mystery of Emily’s family along with her. This page-turner is heartbreaking as well as heartwarming, and it set me off to reading all of Harmel’s novels.
From New York Times bestselling author Kristin Harmel, a beautifully repackaged and updated edition of “one of her best” (RT Book Reviews) historical novels.
Emily Emerson is used to being alone; her dad walked out on the family when she was a just a kid, her mom died when she was eighteen, and her beloved grandmother has just passed away as well. But when she's laid off from her reporting job, she finds herself completely adrift...until the day she receives a beautiful painting of a young woman standing at the edge of a sugarcane field under a violet sky. She…
Growing up, I felt both the denial and existential shame in the ether of my family—that something was missing. Decades after my birth, I learned that many of my ancestors died by the Nazis. I’m Jewish, but it was never mentioned; my grandfather and father kept it quiet. In fact, we celebrated Christmas. I started to research my lineage at the same time I was writing a story about a catholic boy who falls in love with a Jewish girl when I stumbled upon a reference to a WWII Nazi slave labor death camp called Berga and was stunned to learn that Jewish POWs were enslaved at a death camp.
When I read this, I was astonished and sickened by this fact: American Jewish POWs removed from their Stalag and taken to secret slave labor death camps were abandoned by their own government. The nonfiction book shook me to the core.
I was given the privilege from this book to read the actual accountings from the survivors themselves; the faith and courage it took to survive a death camp only subsequently be forced to sign an oath of secrecy to cover up the U.S. government’s non-response was both tragic and beyond heroic.
I can’t imagine holding on to the horrors of abuse and death for half a century. I was terribly relieved and heartened to learn some of the men who survived the death camp eventually let their stories be told.
One common explanation for the worlds failure to prevent the Holocaust is that the information about the Nazi extermination program seemed too incredible to believe. Fifty years later, Americans may now also find it difficult to believe that their fellow citizens were among the twelve million people murdered by the Nazis, abandoned to this fate by their own government. The outbreak of war in Europe put tens of thousands of American civilians, especially Jews, in deadly peril, but the State Department failed to help them. As a consequence of this callous policy many sufferedand some died. Later, when the United…
I am an Icelandic writer, best known for crime fiction although I have also written horror and children’s books. From a young age I have been a fan of creepiness and horror. My threshold for the macabre is thus high, maybe best witnessed by me noting that my first crime series featuring lawyer Thora was a cosy crime series, only to be reminded that in the first installment the eyes of a dead body were removed with a teaspoon, in the second a child was killed and the third featured decapitation. Whenever I need a reprise from writing crime I revert to horror, the best received of these being I Remember You.
It is only fair that John Ajvide Lindqvist gets two mentions out of my five. He is the Nordic author most committed to the genre and damn good at it to boot. As a result, there was a lot to choose from and yet I decided on the title that is possibly the least likely to hold mass appeal, despite a premise that might seem most horror reader’s cup of tea. Ten people in campervans, plus a dog and a cat, wake up to find the world as they knew it has disappeared. What happens next is presented from a multiple POW and is disturbing, harrowing, gory, and creepy. The part that is not for everyone is that the story is hard to wrap your head around. But for those horror aficionados that do not need a perfect explanation at the end are in for a hell of a ride…
A supernatural superthriller from the author of Let the Right One In
Molly wakes her mother to go to the toilet. The campsite is strangely blank. The toilet block has gone. Everything else has gone too. This is a place with no sun. No god.
Just four families remain. Each has done something to bring them here - each denies they deserve it. Until they see what's coming over the horizon, moving irrevocably towards them. Their worst mistake. Their darkest fear.
And for just one of them, their homecoming.
This gripping conceptual horror takes you deep into one of the…
When I was invited to write a historical fiction that appealed to male readers, I wanted to showcase the struggles and dramas in peacetime rather than in war. Scientists vilifying the fly in order to demonstrate the connection between microbes and disease—and enlisting children to kill the fly—now that was a battle I could get behind. Revenge on the Fly, in all the forty books I’ve written, is my only foray into historical fiction. However, like most writers, I read across the genres voraciously. What I most love to read and write about are strong characters who demonstrate unwavering resilience.
This story has won many awards including the Geoffrey Bilson Award for historical fiction but I love it for looking at the German side of World War II, not the battle but the prejudices a 12-year-old Canadian German and a 17-year-old German prisoner of war face in rural Alberta. Karen creates compelling fiction that humanizes instead of demonizes “the enemy.”
It's WWII. Erich, a young German prisoner of war who dislikes Nazism, and Max, the twelve-year-old son of German immigrants, become friends when Erich is sent to work at a Canadian logging camp near Max's town. But with a saboteur haunting the logging camp and anti-German feeling running high in town, their friendship puts them both in danger.
Seventeen-year-old Erich is a prisoner of war working at a northern Alberta logging camp. Twelve-year-old Max goes to school-reluctantly-in the nearby town. The two would be unlikely friends, except that neither has anyone else to turn to. At the height of World…
I didn’t enjoy my first degree in Modern History and Political Science and it took twenty-five years and another MA in Women’s History, Gender, and Society, before my enthusiasm was rekindled. I’ve always believed it’s important to know where we come from, as well as the history of our country, and I don’t just mean wars, laws, and politics – but the lives of ordinary people, men, women, and children, because finally, we discover that our hopes, aspirations, and challenges are not so very different to the people who lived 500 years ago. I’m also passionate about the reality of women’s lived experience in all periods of history.
I love this book despite feeling frustrated by the excessive detail. Turner brings Chaucer’s cosmopolitan world and diverse literary works to life by focusing on places and spaces significant to him. I especially enjoyed the chapter on Households, where Chaucer was sent to serve in his adolescence, like many of his contemporaries, as page-boy, valet, entertainer, general factotum. I also learnt about his international travels, as a diplomat, prisoner of war, member of Parliament, and the sadness of his unfulfilled private life.
The last two chapters recount Chaucer’s final year living in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, his sudden death, relatively obscure burial, subsequent reburial in Poet’s Corner, and elevation as Father of English Literature, which Turner controversially challenges, placing him in a European cultural background.
An acclaimed biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English writers
Geoffrey Chaucer is often called the father of English literature, but this acclaimed biography reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the circulation of his writings, Marion Turner reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. From the wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence, the book recounts Chaucer's…
I vividly remember visiting our local museum as a little girl and being fascinated by the carefully displayed artifacts of the past, especially the ordinary things people had touched and used on a daily basis: a wooden bowl, a stone tool, an old bottle, its logo embossed on a blue glass surface. It made me want to travel through time, to touch the past, to be inside the hearts and minds of the people who came before me. I wanted to learn about their lives, their joys and suffering, and especially to learn from their mistakes. Each of the books I’ve suggested offers an opportunity to step into the shoes of another and time travel with them.
Eng’s novel serves up everything I love about time travel through historical fiction – it’s transportive and compelling and opens a window into a time and culture I knew little about.
Toggling back and forth in time from contemporary Malaysia to its Japanese occupation during World War 2 and into the immediate post-war period, the writing is stunningly lyrical, the central characters are beautifully drawn, and the author evokes a sense of time and place that is shrouded in both tragedy and mystery.
Even better, the book explores some of my favorite themes: memory, love and the secrets we keep in order to survive.
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes." Then she can design a garden for herself.…
My father was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore on the 15th of February 1942. He spent three and a half years slaving on the Thai Burma railway. During my early years growing up, my father rarely talked about his experiences, and it wasn't until after he died in 1990 that I became interested in what he went through as a prisoner of war. Since then, I've spent my time researching the Japanese prisoner of war experiences and have read countless books on the subject. I myself have published four books and I consider myself one of the leading experts on the Japanese prisoner of war experience.
Judy was a beautiful liver and white English pointer, and the only official animal POW of World War 2 truly was a dog in a million. Whether she was dragging men to safety from the wreckage of a torpedoed chip or scavenging food for the starving inmates of a hellish Japanese prisoner of war camp, her unbreakable spirit brought inspiration and hope to men living through the 20th century's darkest days during their captivity. Judy's uncanny ability to sense danger matched with her quick thinking and impossible daring saved countless lives. She was a close companion to those who became like a family to her, sharing in both the tragedies and joys they faced. Her incredible story based here on the testimonies of the last few veterans who knew her is one of the most heartwarming and inspiring tales you will ever read.
The impossibly moving story of how Judy, World War Two's only animal POW, brought hope in the midst of hell.
Judy, a beautiful liver and white English pointer, and the only animal POW of WWII, truly was a dog in a million, cherished and adored by the British, Australian, American and other Allied servicemen who fought to survive alongside her.
Viewed largely as human by those who shared her extraordinary life, Judy's uncanny ability to sense danger, matched with her quick-thinking and impossible daring saved countless lives. She was a close companion to men who became like a family to…
As a professional historian of the Middle East, I’ve long recognized WWI as a vital turning point in the region’s history, when the ancient Ottoman Empire fell and the modern states of the Middle East took its place. Based in Oxford, I am particularly aware of this university’s role in shaping so many of those whose book captured the British experience of the Ottoman Front. But there’s also an element of family history behind my fascination, as in following the story of my great-uncle’s death in Gallipoli in 1915, I came to appreciate the magnitude of sacrifice suffered by all sides in the Great War in the Middle East.
Jones was a Welshman who served in the Indian Army in Mesopotamia. He was among the 13,000+ officers and men who surrendered at Kut al-Amara in April 1916. However, he has nothing to say of the horrors of the siege of Kut, or the fate that befell common soldiers, many of whom were marched to death in the Syrian desert. As an officer, Jones was dispatched to the relative comfort of a prisoner of war camp in Yozgat, in central Turkey, and his story begins there in 1917. It is a madcap story of how the British prisoners conspired to persuade their Turkish captors that they were mediums and were able to communicate with spirits through a Ouija board. Jones and one of his fellow officers then feigned madness to secure their repatriation to Britain. While there is something of the tone of a public school adventure to it all,…
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
