Showing titles in 20th Century

London, 1915. As German bombs rain down on the East End of London and hungry children queue for rations in the blistering cold, 15-year-old Florrie is forced to grow up fast. With her father fighting in the muddy trenches, Florrie turns to her older sister Edith for comfort. But the war has changed Edith. She has grown quiet, with dark shadows under her eyes, and has started leaving the house at night in secret. When Florrie follows her sister through the dark and winding streets of London, she is shocked by what she discovers.

Dashing and well-connected, Lanny Budd has earned the trust of the Nazi high command. To Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, the American art dealer is a “true believer” committed to their Fascist cause. But Lanny is actually a secret agent serving as President Franklin Roosevelt’s eyes and ears in Germany. When he learns of the Führer’s plans for conquest, Lanny’s dire warnings to Neville Chamberlain and other reluctant European leaders fall on deaf ears.

England, 1940. Literature student Ruth Gladstone evacuates Cambridge University for Martynsborough, a tiny English village with a shadowy history. For Ruth, retreating to a forgotten corner of the country is more than a safety maneuver; it’s an opportunity to end an undesirable engagement and begin writing her first novel. But upon her arrival, Ruth learns of a ghostly wraith haunting the villagers after decades of silence. Although Ruth is enthralled by the legend, the locals are less charmed by the wraith’s return.

Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, follows the adventures of a group of young, hard-drinking, American expatriates - which Hemingway refers to as the "Lost Generation" - as they pinball through Europe, from France to Spain and back again.

1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has spent her life secure in the certainty of a bright, happy future - until one night of passion has more catastrophic consequences than she ever could have anticipated. Labelled a moral defective and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act, she is forced to endure years of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those who are supposed to care for her.

When Catherine Saxon, an American correspondent reporting on the war in Europe, is found murdered in her London digs, news of her death is concealed by British authorities. Serving as a linchpin between Scotland Yard and the Secret Service, Robert MacFarlane pays a visit to Maisie Dobbs, seeking her help. He is accompanied by an agent from the US Department of Justice - Mark Scott, the American who helped Maisie get out of Hitler’s Munich in 1938. MacFarlane asks Maisie to work with Scott to uncover the truth about Saxon’s death.

When Darcie purchases several old suitcases at auction that had been abandoned in a railway station locker, she doesn't know what to expect. The first is disappointing but as she opens the second, she discovers rare and beautiful dresses for the 1940s, lovingly folded, and a notebook of designs to go with them. Written inside the cover is the name: Nathalie Leroux Why did she leave her most prized possessions at the station eighty years ago? Darcie's quest for answers will draw her into the world of the French resistance as she works to uncover the truth about a devastating wartime secret.

From the award-winning author of The Day I Died and The Lucky One, a captivating suspense novel about nurses during World War II who come to Agatha Christie’s holiday estate to care for evacuated children, but when a body is discovered nearby, the idyllic setting becomes host to a deadly mystery.

Leros has been a catastrophe. The Germans invaded, overran and captured the island leaving Castelrozzo (ABC) as the last one still in Allied hands. The Luftwaffe now has air superiority over the entire Aegean Theatre of Operations. Neither the U.S. nor Royal Navy will risk capital ships in the AO due to the threat posed by enemy air. The Long Range Desert Group has been reduced to approximately fifty patrolmen.

Alex Ehren is poet, a prisoner, and a teacher in block 31 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known as the Children's Block. He spends his days trying to survive and illegally giving lessons to his young charges, all while shielding them as best he can from the impossible horrors of the camp. But trying to teach the children is not the only illicit activity that Alex is involved in. Alex is keeping a diary....

In this gripping WWII time-slip novel from the author whose books have been called “propulsive” and a “must-read” (Publishers Weekly), Grace Tonquin is an American Quaker who works tirelessly in Vichy France to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis. After crossing the treacherous Pyrénées, Grace returns home to Oregon with a brother and sister whose parents were lost during the war. Though Grace and her husband love Élias and Marguerite as their own, echoes of Grace’s past and trauma from the Holocaust tear the Tonquin family apart.

London, 2017: When Aurelia Leclaire inherits an opulent Paris apartment, she is shocked to discover her grandmother’s hidden secrets - including a treasure trove of famous art and couture gowns. One obscure painting leads her to Gabriel Seymour, a highly respected art restorer with his own mysterious past. Together they attempt to uncover the truths concealed within the apartment’s walls.

Home alone one morning, Sheldon witnesses a dispute between the woman who lives upstairs and an aggressive stranger. When events turn dire, Sheldon seizes and shields the neighbor’s young son from the violence, and they flee the scene. As Sheldon and the boy look for a safe haven in an alien world, past and present weave together, forcing them ever forward to a wrenching moment of truth.

1941. Audrey Coltrane has always wanted to fly. It's why she implored her father to teach her at the little airfield back home in Texas. It’s why she signed up to train military pilots in Hawaii when the war in Europe began. And it’s why she insists she is not interested in any dream-derailing romantic involvements, even with the disarming Lieutenant James Hart, who fast becomes a friend as treasured as the women with whom she flies. Then one fateful day, she gets caught in the air over Pearl Harbor just as the bombs begin to fall, and suddenly, nowhere feels safe.

After a devastating attack by a downed Japanese aircraft, Art Turner and the men of Bull Shark try to forget and relax in the rustic Western Australian port of Fremantle. Yet war is never far away, and the battle cry once more draws the submarine into danger. Uncle Charlie Lockwood has a special side mission for Art Turner. A British commando needs to get to Timor and reunite with the Australian guerrilla fighters he’s trained… and who he was forced to leave behind when the Japanese invaded.

American heiress India, Lady Kilnsey, enjoys the very comfortable life of an English peeress in her husband's ancestral castle. She is deeply in love with her earl, and he adores her. Her inherited fortune provides a life that is elegant, happy, and peaceful, but ominous clouds are gathering across the Channel. The clang of rattling sabers can be heard throughout Europe. In a few short months, their lives are altered forever. Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated, and the world explodes in war bringing previously unimaginable changes to castle life and in India herself.

1940, Jersey. When Nazi forces occupy Jersey in the English Channel Islands, Céline Huber, who is married to a German, must decide where her loyalty lies. Love for her island and fear for her Jewish friend Rachel soon propel her into a dangerous double life. Meanwhile, Céline’s husband Fred is conscripted into the Wehrmacht in occupied France. Horrified by Nazi acts of atrocity and torture, he soon becomes a double agent for the French Resistance.

Ukraine, 1923. On a small farm, two boys are born within days of each other, both Ukrainian, one Jewish. Mykhail and Asher grow up inseparable, together finding friendship, adventure and escape from the harshness of Russian rule. But after Asher’s family flees to Warsaw, their worlds are torn to shreds by the Second World War. The war brings cruelty to both boys. Although Asher finds love in Warsaw, the city is far from the haven his family sought; meanwhile Mykhail becomes a victim of the bitter struggle for Ukraine. But worse follows, in the shape of the Treblinka death camp.

The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta family, encompasses the entire social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I. The author's greatest achievement, The Radetzky March is an unparalleled portrait of a civilization in decline, and as such a universal story for our times.

It's New Year's Eve in Bombay, 1913, and Madeline Bright, new to the sweltering heat of colonial India, is yearning for all she has left behind in England. Then, at the stroke of midnight, Maddy meets Luke Devereaux, and as the year changes, so do both their lives. Bold and charismatic, Luke opens her eyes to the wonders of Bombay, while Maddy's beauty and vivacity captures his heart. Only her mother disapproves, preferring the devoted Guy Bowen as a match for her daughter.