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.
“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.
“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
“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
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.” Read more...
Simon Mawer, Novelist
“Many good thrillers ask: “What if … ?” The question here is: What if Hitler had won? That is such a bold and interesting concept. It is true that others writers had played with this concept before, but Robert Harris brilliantly executed it and sketches in an entire world of early 1960s Hitlerite Berlin.” Read more...
Sam Bourne, Journalist
“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.”
Lovely War
by Julie Berry
Strictly speaking, Lovely War is more about World War I, but it's set in 1942 in a hotel in Manhattan, where three Greek gods have got themselves into a love triangle. As a recent book for young adults that has won critical acclaim for its unusual approach, we've included it on this list for your consideration.
“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
