The dramatic events and scope of World War 2 make it one of the most popular settings for historical fiction. The range of books varies widely, from real-life stories written up as novels, to entirely fictional accounts which use one or more of the many horrific events of World War II as backdrop.
Sometimes recommended by historians as vivid accounts of the era—able to describe emotions and conversations in a way nonfiction can't—a number of novels set in World War 2 also have considerable literary merit, with at least three winning the Booker Prize, the UK's 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 Grossman's Life and Fate, give unmissable insights into terrible episodes—by someone who was there.
“I 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. I’ve just read it for the third time when I knew I was going to be talking to you. I finished it yesterday. It’s set during the Second World War and it’s mainly the story of this group of six women. They’re doing men’s jobs and have much more leeway than either before or after the war. So they’re working in factories, driving ambulances, being ARP wardens or firefighters—because there weren’t 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 it’s in front of us…The 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 ‘Oh, that’s why and that’s why and that’s why.’ It’s another way of looking at history, which I also thought was really interesting.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
“I think the title in English is probably the worst title I’ve ever come across in my life. However, this book has knocked everything else I’ve ever read about the Second World War out of the park. It is just incredible…Jonathan Littell’s stroke of genius is inventing, as his central character, an SS Hauptsturmführer called Dr. Maximilien Aue. A middle-ranking and bureaucratically gifted manager, he’s assigned by the SS to keep tabs on what’s 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.” Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley, Thriller and Crime Writer
M: Son of the Century
by Antonio Scurati
🏆 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.
“This 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 they’re back in Capri and recovering before going off again. It has a sense of place. But, at the same time—and this is really the point about much war literature—it’s about what it reflects of war more generally. And this book does that.” Read more...
The Best Military History Books
Hew Strachan, Military Historians & Veteran
These Days
by Lucy Caldwell
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
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."
“It’s a thriller that’s 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 it’s about a Jewish woman who is rescued by a fisherman who hides her. It’s an extraordinary adventure story. The fisherman’s 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.” Read more...
Matthew Rice, Artists & Art Critic
“Steven Conte’s writing is direct and compelling—the 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 story…This 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, it’s also a love-through-literature story.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“Wouk writes an enormous panoramic novel about World War II. War and Remembrance is the second half of this two-volume novel – 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. It’s a lecture on Job, delivered to a group of Jews the night before many of them will be deported to Auschwitz.” Read more...
Paula Fredriksen, Theologians & Historians of Religion
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Richard Flanagan
***Winner of the 2014 Booker Prize***
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.
The Balkan Trilogy
by Olivia Manning
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 train—Guy has a teaching job in Bucharest—just as the Nazis are invading Poland. This is one of the great novels of World War II, and based on Manning's own experiences.
The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
***Winner of the 1992 Booker Prize***
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.
“Burma Boy made me laugh a lot. I really enjoyed the book because it felt lighthearted…He’s 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. It’s 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 he’s there.” Read more...
Blessing Musariri, Novelist
Tightrope
by Simon Mawer
Winner of the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
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.
Lust, Caution
by Eileen Chang
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.
“It follows a girl called Liesel, the eponymous book thief of the title, and her life in Nazi Germany. It starts when she’s about nine and follows her for the next six years. It’s a story about mortality, love and language. The thing that makes it unique, and obviously relevant to this conversation, is that it’s narrated by Death, who appears to have synaesthesia.” Read more...
Schindler's Ark
by Thomas Keneally
***Winner of the 1982 Booker Prize***
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.
“This is one of the greatest books that I know. It is beautifully done. There is an anonymous narrator who is clearly based on Giorgio Bassani’s own experiences. Again, it is an oblique look at the fate of European Jews…The 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 ‘garden’ of the Finzi- Continis but ‘park’ would do it more justice. During their childhood days the narrator couldn’t really aspire to knowing them but circumstances – the race laws – 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.” Read more...
Simon Mawer, Novelist
“Fatherland’s central conceit is that it takes place in Hitler’s Berlin in 1964. Hitler is 75. The 20th of April, the Fuhrer’s 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 Harris’s part. It starts off with a body in the Havel, near a favoured island in Berlin called Schwanenwerder. It’s the body of a man called Josef Bühler. Another body is found—of 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, who’s still alive, a guy that Robert Harris has playfully named Martin Luther.” Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley, Thriller and Crime Writer
“He 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 was…a 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 control…I also like the scope of the book, which takes you from Italy to England to West Africa to Crete.” Read more...
Novels and Memoirs of World War II
James Holland, Military Historians & Veteran
The Long Take
by Robin Robertson
***Winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction***
Written in verse, The Long Take by Scottish poet Robin Robertson is mostly set in post-war Los Angeles. It tracks a Canadian veteran of D-Day who has flashbacks to World War II and is suffering from PTSD. Though it did not ultimately win Britain's top fiction prize, The Long Take was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is as beautifully written as you would expect a novel written by a poet to be.
“Original, innovative and, in our judgement, durable, with writing of such power that you occasionally have to stop to recover. The Long Take is a work of supreme artistry. Walter Scott would have read it and marvelled.” Read more...
The Best of Historical Fiction: The 2019 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“I 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 Dunkirk…….It is steeped in authenticity. It all feels right. All the characters feel very real, because they were based on real people. I can’t think of another book which more vividly captures the mood at that time of an upper middle-class family on the cusp of war.” Read more...
Novels and Memoirs of World War II
James Holland, Military Historians & Veteran
Life and Fate
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 is the precursor to Life and Fate, translated into English for the first time in 2019 and also well worth reading)
Stalingrad
by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life and Fate is one of our most recommended books, especially popular with historians. It remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1964, but went on to attract enormous acclaim—and has been described more than once as "the War and Peace of the 20th century." Stalingrad is its precursor. Initially published in the 1950s under the Russian title 'For a Just Cause', it has now been translated for the first time into English by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler, as well as being significantly reworked to reinsert text from earlier manuscripts that were censored during the Soviet era.
Equal to Life and Fate in its size and epic scope, the publication of Stalingrad is—as Marcel Theroux has remarked —“like discovering the Bayeux tapestry has a prequel.”
“Set in the Netherlands during World War II, it’s about a young boy and the things he gets up to during the German occupation. Jan Terlouw, now in his 80s, based it partly on his own experiences, but the book has all the nice plot twists you expect from fiction. Also, as a children’s book written nearly half a century ago about a period of Dutch history that the country still struggles to come to terms with, I thought it might be a bit black-and-white: but it actually isn’t.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Children’s Books
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“I realised at the end that this raid should never have happened. The Germans knew about it. It had been discovered in its former incarnation (not as Operation Jubilee but as Operation Rutter) by the Luftwaffe. They’d spotted the invasion fleet off the Isle of Wight, bombed the key ferries, and gone home. There was only one tidal chance left the following month. They thought that even the Brits wouldn’t be silly enough to have a second go. What they’d underestimated was the command chain…There was no one in charge and it was Mountbatten who took the decision to remount the expedition, in the belief that split-second timing would land those 6,000 Canadians on the beach at the right time to storm the defences, kill lots of Germans, create havoc inland, and then stage a dignified and successful retreat. None of that happened, for the reasons you’ll discover if you read the book.” Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley, Thriller and Crime Writer
“I read this book as soon as it came out. It was the first of a number of revisionist takes on the RAF’s performance in the early years of the war. It’s set in the period between 1939 and 1940, and the Phoney War (French: drôle de guerre). We were sorely unprepared for it. Above all, the RAF was sorely unprepared for it. The novel casts a fairly jaundiced eye upon what happened to the men in Hornet Squadron. They’ve been shipped out to northern France. In the book’s opening pages, Squadron Leader Ramsey lands his Hurricane after a trial flight in broad daylight and ends up nose down in the slit-trench. He tries to get out of the cockpit, falls, breaks his neck, and dies. He’s replaced by a New Zealander called Squadron Leader ‘Fanny’ Barton. Within a couple of weeks, he shoots down what he takes to be a two-engine enemy aircraft and realises rather late in the day that it’s a Blenheim, one of our own.” Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley, Thriller and Crime Writer
“The HMS Ulysses was a light cruiser, one of the warships on the Arctic run that went from Scapa Flow in the Orkneys (way off the top of Scotland) via Norway and around the North Cape to Murmansk. These were incredibly risky and horrible journeys, with the odds that you would come to grief. We lost over 100 ships on those Arctic convoys…I realised, as anyone reading this book will realise, that it’s an essay in exhaustion. The book starts off with a mutiny. The men are knackered, and they have had enough. The Vice Admiral, known as Farmer Giles, has made a series of terrible decisions and suffered a mental breakdown. The captain, whose name is Richard Vallery, has tuberculosis. He’s a sick man, but he’s ultra-loyal to his ship and his crew and is determined to get them through it. This is a key convoy, and he’s there to protect it. Alistair MacLean had served on these convoys. He’d been a wireless and torpedo operator as a seventeen-year-old, so he had hands-on experience of what it was like. That’s key.” Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley, Thriller and Crime Writer
“I 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 research…It’s painstaking in terms of its detail…What’s 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. It’s a hugely ambitious novel…Each of the points of the narrative throws up subplots, in terms of wives, kids, mistresses, and emotional complications. The plane doesn’t take off until halfway through the book. It’s 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.” Read more...
The Best World War II Thrillers
Graham Hurley, Thriller and Crime Writer
The Best World War II Thrillers, recommended by Graham Hurley
For all its horrors, World War II was a time when things happened to people and that, perhaps, is what makes it such an enduring source of fascination. Graham Hurley, author of the Spoils of War series, recommends five of the best World War II thrillers, including one that reads like nonfiction.
