S ometimes recommended by historians as vivid accounts of the eraâable to describe emotions and conversations in a way nonfiction canâtâa number of novels set in World War 2 also have considerable literary merit, with at least three winning the Booker Prize, the UKâs most prestigious prize for a novel.
Below are our recommendations of the best historical fiction set in World War 2, also including novels written by participants in the war. While not technically historical fiction (which, according to the accepted definition, should be written at least half a century after the events described) they are works of fiction about history and, as in the case of Vasily Grossmanâs Life and Fate
âThis is one of the greatest books that I know. It is beautifully done. There is an anonymous narrator who is clearly based on Giorgio Bassaniâs own experiences. Again, it is an oblique look at the fate of European JewsâŚThe central relationship is between the girl Micol Finzi-Contini and the narrator himself. Her family is extremely grand and very reserved. They have a very large house in a magnificent park. The title calls it the âgardenâ of the Finzi- Continis but âparkâ would do it more justice. During their childhood days the narrator couldnât really aspire to knowing them but circumstances â the race laws â throw them together: excluded from the local tennis club because they are Jews, they start their own tennis group, meeting in the Finzi-Contini garden.â Read more...
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Simon Mawer ,
Novelist
âThis book is a mini-classic that is neglected. It gives a very good feel about what it was like to be on the Italian campaign, but it also gives a good feel about war. It is specific to Anzio, absolutely. There is a moment when theyâre back in Capri and recovering before going off again. It has a sense of place. But, at the same timeâand this is really the point about much war literatureâitâs about what it reflects of war more generally. And this book does that.â Read more...
The Best Military History Books
Hew Strachan ,
Military Historians & Veteran
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler
Life and Fate , a novel set in World War II by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman , is one of our most recommended books on Five Books (including by historians). Modeled on Tolstoy's War and Peace , Grossman brought into it his experience as a journalist, accompanying the Red Army at major battles, including Stalingrad and Berlin. He was also among the first to enter Treblinka and witness firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust . Sadly for Grossman, the book was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime.
Life and Fate is a long novel. If you want to listen to it as an audiobook, there's no unabridged version, BUT there is a dramatised version of Life and Fate , starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, that lasts a manageable 8 hours.
(Stalingrad  Life and Fate , translated into English for the first time in 2019 and also well worth reading)
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Tightrope by Simon Mawer is a historical fiction novel that tells the story of Marian Sutro, a young woman who worked as a secret agent for the British during World War II. The book explores the themes of love, loss, and betrayal as Marian struggles to come to terms with her experiences during the war and navigate the challenges of post-war life. Mawer's writing is both evocative and insightful, bringing to life the sights, sounds, and emotions of a tumultuous period in history. With its compelling characters, rich historical detail, and poignant themes, Tightrope is a masterful work of fiction that will stay with readers long after they turn the last page.
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âSteven Conteâs writing is direct and compellingâthe chapter describing a forty-hour shift of operations on the wounded is a masterclass of relentless horror and humour. But The Tolstoy Estate is much more than just a war storyâŚThis novel is also a love story and, with most of the action taking place at Yasnaya Polyana, the former estate of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, itâs also a love-through-literature story.â Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant ,
Historical Novelist
âItâs certainly a thriller. Itâs tense, tense, tense. But the big thing in this novel is not just the tension, itâs the voices. Joseph OâConnor gives a masterclass in the different voices of the people gathered around the priest Hugh OâFlaherty to help him organise and run the Escape Lineâthe escape routes out of Italy for POWs and others being pursued by the Nazis. If you feel you know Rome, youâll find much to enjoy in the twists and turns of the streets, the hidden alleys, the sudden expanses and that ever-present âseethe of black waterâ, the Tiber. Itâs full Rome immersion.â Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction of 2024
Katharine Grant ,
Historical Novelist
The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a doctor from Tasmania who, as an old man, flashes back to his time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, building the infamous Burma Railway.
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Lust, Caution is set in Shanghai during World War II, and brings to life the difficult choices people had to make between working with the occupying Japanese forces or resisting them. A novella, this short book is also a good way into the writing of Eileen Chang, with a love story at centre stage and a sense of the glamour of pre-Communist Shanghai. The book was turned into a movie by Ang Lee.
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The Balkan Trilogy (all three books are bound together in the edition pictured, published by NYRB Classics) follows the fortunes of an English couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle. Newly married, they make their way to Romania by trainâGuy has a teaching job in Bucharestâjust as the Nazis are invading Poland. This is one of the great novels of World War II, and based on Manning's own experiences.
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âIt follows a girl called Liesel, the eponymous book thief of the title, and her life in Nazi Germany. It starts when sheâs about nine and follows her for the next six years. Itâs a story about mortality, love and language. The thing that makes it unique, and obviously relevant to this conversation, is that itâs narrated by Death, who appears to have synaesthesia.â Read more...
The best books on Synaesthesia
Lydia Ruffles ,
âI think the title in English is probably the worst title Iâve ever come across in my life. However, this book has knocked everything else Iâve ever read about the Second World War out of the park. It is just incredibleâŚJonathan Littellâs stroke of genius is inventing, as his central character, an SS HauptsturmfĂźhrer called Dr. Maximilien Aue. A middle-ranking and bureaucratically gifted manager, heâs assigned by the SS to keep tabs on whatâs happening in Russia as the Wehrmacht pushes on and making sure the job is well done as the Einsatzgruppen move from village to town to city killing Jews and gypsies and intellectuals in their thousands.â Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley ,
Thriller and Crime Writer
The English Patient is a beautiful novel by Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet Michael Ondaatje. Set in Tuscany in Italy towards the end of World War II, it goes back in time to the beginning of the war and the campaign in North Africa. If you haven't seen the movie yet, read the novel first.
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âThe novel was written by Michael Ondaatje. It was published in 1992 and won the Booker Prize. We made the film in 1995 and it was released in 1996. Anthony Minghella wrote and directed it and it won nine Academy Awards. I should give the disclaimer that I directed second unit on the film. The âEnglishâ patient is LĂĄszlĂł von AlmĂĄsy, a Hungarian count and desert explorer, who gets caught up in the North African campaign of World War Two. He is also in a romance with a married English woman, which leads to a tragedy and his near death. Rescued from the crash of his plane, he is brought to Italy and through force of circumstances is left in the care of a young French-Canadian nurse, Hana, in a ruined monastery in Tuscany. Something that really fascinates me in rereading the novel, rewatching the film, and reading Michael Ondaatjeâs comments on his novel, is the significance of the desert.â Read more...
The Best Book-to-Movie Adaptations
Peter Markham ,
Film Director
âBurma Boy made me laugh a lot. I really enjoyed the book because it felt lightheartedâŚHeâs a young boy who lies about his age and gets recruited into the African contingent of the army that was being sent to fight for Britain. So he goes to Burma with all the other soldiers. Itâs about his experiences in the war, in the barracks in Burma, and his comrades and people from different parts of Nigeria that he meets while heâs there.â Read more...
The Best African Novels
Blessing Musariri ,
Novelist
This was the Booker Prize-winning novel, based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, that was turned into the movie Schindler's List. A member of the Nazi party at the beginning of World War II and no saint, Schindler would end up saving more than 1,000 Jews from death, employing them in his factory and doing whatever it took to protect them.
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đ Winner of the 2022 European Book Prize
Antonio Scurati's novel about the rise of Fascism in Italy, told from the point of view of Benito Mussolini. There are also excerpts from newspapers and reports. The first in a trilogy, this 700+ page book includes the March on Rome as well as the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, ending in 1925.
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âI love the Cazalet books, and Marking Time is part of that series. I also loved the TV adaptation, which only ran for one series but was fabulously filmed and acted. This is the best book in the series. War is coming, and the Cazalet family are plunged into the situation. Like everyone else they have to deal with the start of the war, and the youngest son goes off to fight in DunkirkâŚâŚ.It is steeped in authenticity. It all feels right. All the characters feel very real, because they were based on real people. I canât think of another book which more vividly captures the mood at that time of an upper middle-class family on the cusp of war.â Read more...
Novels and Memoirs of World War II
James Holland ,
Military Historians & Veteran
âI leapt on Bomber and I devoured it. It was a departure for Len Deighton, because it had taken a year and a half for him to researchâŚItâs painstaking in terms of its detailâŚWhatâs incontestable is that this fictitious bombing raid is invented for the night of the 31st of June 1943, and the events are narrated from multiple points of view. Itâs a hugely ambitious novelâŚEach of the points of the narrative throws up subplots, in terms of wives, kids, mistresses, and emotional complications. The plane doesnât take off until halfway through the book. Itâs driven on (as your life would be, if you were part of that crew) by this remorseless determination to join the bomber stream; to evade, if possible, the attentions of the gunners and the night fighters; to plant your bombs as close as possible. In the dark, with the kind of rudimentary bomb aiming gear that they had, that was incredibly difficult to do, as well as bad news for the people underneath, many of whom were in villages short of the target. They were the ones who tended to get woken up at night by a very large bang. Len Deighton, at the controls of this book, did incredible justice to all of that.â Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley ,
Thriller and Crime Writer
Lucy Caldwell's fifth novel is set during the Belfast Blitz, a series of four devastating major air raids on the Northern Irish city in 1941. It's "an under-told chapter in the fiction of my city," as Caldwell reflected; researching the book felt like "a strange, intense sort of solace" during the early days of the Covid crisis. The novel focuses on two sisters, Audrey and Emma, whose comfortable middle-class existence is shattered during the attacks. While announcing the shortlist for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, the judges noted that "the juxtaposition of the horrific and mundane and the authenticity of detail makes this novel an exceptional study of the terrors and consequences of war."
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âItâs a thriller thatâs set in the lagoon and in Venice and northern Italy, towards the end of World War Two, in 1945. It begins with the murder of a German officer and itâs about a Jewish woman who is rescued by a fisherman who hides her. Itâs an extraordinary adventure story. The fishermanâs brother is a rising star of Fascist Italian cinema and is a great favorite of the local Gauleiter but also of Il Duce. So one brother is basically a partisan and the other is an apparatchik of the regime.â Read more...
The best books on Venice
Matthew Rice ,
Artists & Art Critic
âI love this book. I first read it years ago, when it came out, and I read it again ten years ago. I also taught it for a while. Iâve just read it for the third time when I knew I was going to be talking to you. I finished it yesterday. Itâs set during the Second World War and itâs mainly the story of this group of six women. Theyâre doing menâs jobs and have much more leeway than either before or after the war. So theyâre working in factories, driving ambulances, being ARP wardens or firefightersâbecause there werenât the men to do those jobs. Sarah Waters starts from the end of the story and we end at the beginning. When we meet all these characters, their story is the past. But itâs in front of usâŚThe Night Watch is so clever. It makes us look at the way the drama unpeels, as opposed to unfolds, if you like. We get to the âOh, thatâs why and thatâs why and thatâs why.â Itâs another way of looking at history, which I also thought was really interesting.â Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson ,
Thriller and Crime Writer
âHe really takes you there. This book brings that world to life in a wonderful way. He is very good on the eccentricity of it, and the madness of the war. There are so many things that we would take for granted that went out of the window in war time. It wasâŚa world of survival. Guy is an everyman. He is just an ordinary good guy, a very sympathetic character, who finds himself in all sorts of terrible situations which are completely beyond his controlâŚI also like the scope of the book, which takes you from Italy to England to West Africa to Crete.â Read more...
Novels and Memoirs of World War II
James Holland ,
Military Historians & Veteran
âWouk writes an enormous panoramic novel about World War II. War and Remembrance is the second half of this two-volume novel â the first half is The Winds of War. He gathers a cast of characters who lead the reader across continents into different theatres of the conflict. His prose is very clear and unsentimental as he narrates one horror after another. This war really was a global convulsion, and not that long ago. Then suddenly, halfway through the second volume, a main character gives an amazing soliloquy, set in one of the Nazi camps. Itâs a lecture on Job, delivered to a group of Jews the night before many of them will be deported to Auschwitz.â Read more...
The best books on Sin
Paula Fredriksen ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
âFatherlandâ s central conceit is that it takes place in Hitlerâs Berlin in 1964. Hitler is 75. The 20th of April, the Fuhrerâs birthday, which is a big national celebration, is fast approaching. The novel is cast as a thriller, which is a very clever decision on Robert Harrisâs part. It starts off with a body in the Havel, near a favoured island in Berlin called Schwanenwerder. Itâs the body of a man called Josef BĂźhler. Another body is foundâof Wilhelm Stuckart. The facts of these two deaths are investigated by a lone detective called Xavier March, who works for the Berlin Kriminalpolizei (Kripo). He identifies a possible third target, whoâs still alive, a guy that Robert Harris has playfully named Martin Luther.â Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley ,
Thriller and Crime Writer
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