World War II England
Top 10 World War II England
: The Shell Seekers, All Clear, Blackout, Good Night, Mr. Tom, Casting Off, The Camomile Lawn, Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942, Marking Time, Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of 'Housewife, 49', Mr. Churchill's Secretary
Artist's daughter Penelope Keeling can look back on a full and varied life: a Bohemian childhood in London and Cornwall, an unhappy wartime marriage, and the one man she truly loved. She has brought up three children - and learned to accept them as they are. Yet she is far too energetic and independent...
| Author | Connie Willis |
| ISBN | 0553807676 |
In Blackout, award-winning author Connie Willis returned to the time-traveling future of 2060—the setting for several of her most celebrated works—and sent three Oxford historians to World War II England: Michael Davies, intent on observing heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk; Merope Ward,...
| Author | Connie Willis |
| ISBN | 0553803190 |
Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day. Polly Churchill’s next...
London is poised on the brink of World War II. Timid, scrawny Willie Beech -- the abused child of a single mother -- is evacuated to the English countryside. At first, he is terrified of everything, of the country sounds and sights, even of Mr. Tom, the gruff, kindly old man who has taken him in. But gradually...
| Author | Elizabeth Jane Howard |
| ISBN | 0671534297 |
This novel observes the Cazalet families and extended families after the war, from July 1945 to the summer of 1947.
Casting off, as a term used in knitting, is the finishing row of whatever article is being knitted. It denotes the ending – a completion. Paradoxically, when people cast off...
| Author | Mary Wesley |
| ISBN | 0099499142 |
Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt's house for their annual ritual of a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with the heady exhilarations...
| Author | Joyce Dennys |
| ISBN | 1408802813 |
Spirited Henrietta wishes she was the kind of doctor's wife who knew exactly how to deal with the daily upheavals of war. But then, everyone in her close-knit Devonshire village seems to find different ways to cope: there's the indomitable Lady B, who writes to Hitler every night to tell him precisely...
| Author | Elizabeth Jane Howard |
| ISBN | 0671527940 |
In this second of the five Cazalet Chronicles, I was impressed once again with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s writing. These are not short novels, yet there is never a dull moment – there is always something interesting going on in their lives.
This story picks up a year after the last one left off....
Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of 'Housewife, 49'
In September 1939, housewife and mother Nella Last began a diary whose entries, in their regularity, length and quality, have created a record of the Second World War which is powerful, fascinating and unique.
When war broke out, Nella's younger son joined the army while the rest of the family...
Mr. Churchill's Secretary
| Author | Susan Elia MacNeal |
| ISBN | 0553593617 |
For fans of Jacqueline Winspear, Laurie R. King, and Anne Perry, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary captures the drama of an era of unprecedented challenge—and the greatness that rose to meet it.
London, 1940. Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat...
Henrietta Sees It Through: More News from the Home Front 1942-1945
| Author | Joyce Dennys |
| ISBN | 1608195163 |
World War II is now in its third year and although nothing can dent the unwavering patriotism of Henrietta and her friends, everyone in the Devonshire village has their anxious moments. Henrietta takes up weeding and plays the triangle in the local orchestra to take her mind off things; the indomitable...
Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Postwar Britain
| Author | Simon Garfield |
| ISBN | 0091897335 |
In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually...
| Author | Susan Elia MacNeal |
| ISBN | 0553593625 |
Susan Elia MacNeal introduced the remarkable Maggie Hope in her acclaimed début, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. Now Maggie returns to protect Britain’s beloved royals against an international plot—one that could change the course of history.
As World War II sweeps the continent and...
| Author | Sarah Blake |
| ISBN | 0143145444 |
There are tons of great stories set during WWII. This is not one of them. It's not even much of a story, it just sort of meanders and then peters out. The main characters aren't much more than plot devices or symbols; in fact, the only people worth caring about are the mostly nameless refugees fleeing the...
| Author | Jan Struther |
| ISBN | 0156631407 |
Ok finished the book. One final thought to complete the review. Mrs. Miniver did have something rather excellent to say on marriages and social life. She said that there was often one of a pair that you liked less than the other, or that one of them would always outshine the other (don't we all know couples...
| Author | Michelle Magorian |
| ISBN | 0064404110 |
I remember first reading this book when I was about 11 or 12 years old. It was a perfect book to read at that age as not only was it a wonderful story that taught me about the toll that a war takes on a child but I also remember identifying with the same awkward adolescent changes and experiences that the protagonist,...
| Author | Len Deighton |
| ISBN | 0586045449 |
The classic novel of the Second World War that relates in devastating detail the 24-hour story of an allied bombing raid.
Bomber is a novel of war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.
Bomber follows the progress of...
Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949
| Author | Virginia Nicholson |
| ISBN | 0670917788 |
In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's Second World War, through a host of individual women's experiences. We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women...
| Author | Nicholas Monsarrat |
| ISBN | 1580800467 |
“[T]hat was the way the war was going; the individual had to retreat or submerge, the simple unfeeling pair of hands must come to the fore. The emphasis was now on the tireless machine of war; men were parts of this machine, and so they must remain, till they fulfilled their function or wore out. If, in...
| Author | Mollie Panter-Downes |
It's a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria...
| Author | Noel Streatfeild |
| ISBN | 0394831470 |
It is 1939, and the Clark family (Nobby and Rosie, and the children Laura, Andy and Tim) lives in South London. Although they are poor - and often hungry - they have a happy home.
There is talk that there may be a war with the Germans, and one Saturday morning the children are taken to the Town Hall...
| Author | Jennifer Ryan |
| ISBN | 1101906758 |
The village of Chilbury in Kent is about to ring in some changes.
This is a delightful novel of wartime gumption and village spirit that will make your heart sing out.Kent, 1940.In the idyllic village of Chilbury change is afoot. Hearts are breaking as sons and husbands leave to fight, and when the...
| Author | Anne C. Voorhoeve |
| ISBN | 0803733607 |
Winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder medal for most oustanding children's book in translation.
Escaping Nazi Germany on the kindertransport changes one girl's life forever
At the start of World War II, ten-year-old Franziska Mangold is torn from her family when she boards the kindertransport...
| Author | Noel Streatfeild |
| ISBN | 1903155053 |
Downer! That's not exactly a criticism, but man, if you're used to Streatfeild's kid lit about children learning arts and overcoming personal and economic challenges you will not be expecting this grim account of a family collapsing under the pressures and changes of the second world war. This is one...
| Author | Marcia Williams |
| ISBN | 0763641111 |
Marcia Williams follows a young girl's coming of age during World War II in a moving fictional journal that includes the author's own family mementos.
The year is 1939, and Britain is about to declare war on Germany. After Flossie's father joins the army, the nine-year-old girl is left to care...
| Author | Andrea Levy |
| ISBN | 0312424671 |
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie,...
| Author | Michelle Cooper |
| ISBN | 1741663741 |
Forced to leave their island kingdom, Sophie FitzOsborne and her eccentric family take shelter in England. Sophie's dreams of making her debut in shimmering ballgowns are finally coming true, but how can she enjoy her new life when they have all lost so much?
Aunt Charlotte is ruthless in her...
A Brief History of Montmaray
| Author | Michelle Cooper |
| ISBN | 0375858644 |
Sophie FitzOsborne lives in a crumbling castle in the tiny island kingdom of Montmaray with her eccentric and impoverished royal family. When she receives a journal for her sixteenth birthday, Sophie decides to chronicle day-to-day life on the island. But this is 1936, and the news that trickles in...
| Author | Kathryn J. Atwood |
| ISBN | 1556529619 |
A 2012 VOYA Nonfiction Honor List selection
Noor Inayat Khan was the first female radio operator sent into occupied France and transferred crucial messages. Johtje Vos, a Dutch housewife, hid Jews in her home and repeatedly outsmarted the Gestapo. Law student Hannie Schaft...
| Author | Susan Lynn Meyer |
| ISBN | 0385738811 |
Sydney Taylor Honor Award Winner Black Radishes is a suspenseful WWII/Holocaust story, in which one boy learns what it means to be Jewish and French at a time when everything is changing.
It is March of 1940. The French believe that their army can protect them from Nazi Germany. But...
| Author | Barbara Bower |
| ISBN | 1903155363 |
Published in 1946, under her married name, Barbara Bower.
Description: Tells the tale of a woman who goes on a cruise and is swept overboard. She lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she...
| Author | D.E. Stevenson |
| ISBN | 0030074916 |
Here is a glimpse behind the scenes of an army post in Scotland in war time, without the constant borrowing of the tragedies of wartime Britain. Social-gossipy recording, pleasant, humorous, popular minutiac, of family and military backdrop. ""Mrs. Tim of the regiment"" carries on through 1940;...
| Author | Nina Bawden |
| ISBN | 0140364560 |
Albert, Carrie and young Nick are war-time evacuees whose lives get so tangled up with the people they've come to live among that the war and their real families seem to belong to another world. Carrie and Nick are billeted in Wales with old Mr Evans, who is so mean and cold, and his timid mouse of a sister,...
| Author | Michelle Cooper |
| ISBN | 0375970509 |
Michelle Cooper completes her heart-stealing epic drama of history and romance with The FitzOsbornes at War.
Sophie FitzOsborne and the royal family of Montmaray escaped their remote island home when the Nazis attacked. But as war breaks out in England and around the world, nowhere is safe....
| Author | Margaret Mayhew |
| ISBN | 0552152439 |
1939 - And in the back of a three-ton lorry, a strangely assorted group of young women bumped over the road to RAF Colston. They were the first of the WAAFs.
Barmaids mixed with secretaries and debutantes. They had appalling living quarters and no uniforms. And, worst of all, the Station Commander,...
| Author | Jessica Francis Kane |
| ISBN | 1555975658 |
A stunning first novel that is an evocative re-imagining of a World War II civilian disaster
On a March night in 1943, on the steps of a London Tube station, 173 people die in a crowd seeking shelter from what seemed to be another air raid. When the devastated neighborhood demands an inquiry, the...
World War II London Blitz Diary, Volume 1
While hundreds of Messerschmitt war planes fly overhead and the sound of hundreds of bombs exploding, Ruby Side
Thompson’s writes her personal during the terrifying World War Two London Blitz. Her diary is a true and detailed account of what she experienced during that horrific time. The diary...
Blitz: The Diary of Edie Benson, London, 1940-1941
| Author | Vince Cross |
| ISBN | 0439997410 |
This book is based on the lives of people living in the famous London Blitz of 1939. It is a diary entry from 1940 by a girl named Edie. I like it because it explains how Edie's family felt during the bombing, so it explains their feelings clearly, I also like the bombing, because you can kind of feel what it's...
Bomb Girls: Britain's Secret Army: The Munitions Women of World War II
| Author | Jacky Hyams |
| ISBN | 1782194428 |
They were the unsung heroines of World War II; the wives, mothers, and teenage girls, all "doing their bit" for the war effort, clocking in daily to work in vast munitions factories, helping make the explosives, bullets, and war machines that would ensure victory for Britain. It was dangerous, dirty,...
