Showing titles in 20th Century

As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, an underfunded MI5 struggles to contain the German and Russian spies who are flocking to England to recruit sympathetic British agents. The section’s biggest challenge, however, lies with fascist aristocrats and several Parliament MPs who support Nazi Germany’s foreign policy and its leader Adolf Hitler. Some of them, including Sir Oswald Mosley, are planning for a revolution if Prime Minister Chamberlain declares war on the Third Reich.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER—for fans of All the Light We Cannot See and The Tattooist of Auschwitz! “Readers will be on the edge of their seats…. A brilliant tale of resistance, courage and ultimately hope.” –Kelly Rimmer, New York Times bestselling author of The Warsaw Orphan From the New...

A gripping alternative history thriller set in the Second World War, from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of the Bernie Gunther novels. Autumn 1943. Hitler knows he cannot win the war: now he must find a way to make peace. FDR and Stalin are willing to negotiate; only...

Brought to you by Penguin. Who will cast the first stone? 1915, the Cabrach, Aberdeenshire. An isolated Scottish community is disturbed by a strange discovery: a body in a peat bog, perfectly preserved. Two people haul the body from the ground: Lizzie, the wife of a wealthy local landowner, and...

Read by the author, Eliza Morton. Full of nostalgia and set against a backdrop of the Festival of Britain and the aftermath of the Second World War, The Children Left Behind is a gritty, emotional, heartwarming and uplifting saga. 1940, Liverpool When Alice Lacey was seven, she and her two best...

A superbly controlled emotional thriller of passion, betrayal and conscience, set in post-War Germany, soon to be made into a major film. Hamburg, 1946. Thousands remain displaced in what is now the British Occupied Zone. Charged with overseeing the rebuilding of this devastated city and the...

A new series from bestselling author Kate Thompson. 'Kate Thompson's wartime novels always strike a chord and Secrets of the Homefront Girls is no exception. You can almost smell the Yardley violets drifting over the factory as the girls live lives complicated by the trials and tribulations of...

The captivating new novel from USA Today bestselling author Sarah Steele is a spellbinding book club read, set in the glittering French Riviera in the dangerous days leading up to the outbreak of WW2. Nestled into the pine-dusted coastline of the Cap d'Antibes is the dazzling white Chateau...

Following a humiliating experience involving the man she thought she’d marry, Iris Tredwick signs up to the Wrens in order to escape and - hopefully - find ‘the right sort’ of man to please her mother. After a bumpy start, Iris manages to befriend outspoken Mary and dreamer Sally as they are sent to their first posting - in Orkney. There she meets engineer Rob, whose flirtatious nature both charms and confounds straight-laced Iris. Much more appropriate for her is local doctor Stewart, if only she felt the same spark for him as she does for Rob.

The Secret Sewing Society is a sweeping, heartbreaking tale about a devastating family mystery, a doomed love affair, and generations of women coming together against the odds. Fans of Evie Woods, Fiona Valpy and The Keeper of Happy Endings will be utterly swept away.

Brought to you by Penguin. This is the story of three women - one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her...

A satirical view of the suffragette movement and an unblinking yet compassionate story that chronicles the impact of the First World War on an ordinary young couple, William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton won the first Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse prize in 1919. Written in a hospital tent to...

Berlin, 1989. As the wall between East and West falls, Miriam Winter cares for her dying father, Henryk. When he cries out for someone named Frieda - and Miriam discovers an Auschwitz tattoo hidden under his watch strap - Henryk’s secret history begins to unravel. Searching for more clues of her father’s past, Miriam finds an inmate uniform from the Ravensbrück women’s camp concealed among her mother’s things. Within its seams are dozens of letters to Henryk written by Frieda.

'Breathless, terrifying U-boat drama... a masterclass in economical, tight-space storytelling, piling the pressure on both characters and audience' Time Out It is autumn 1941 and a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over...

In April 1938, a man calling himself Josef Hofmann arrives at a boarding house in Hamm, Germany, and lets a room from the widow who owns it. Fifty years later, Walter Gersdorff, the widow's son, who was 11 years old in the spring of 1938, discovers the carefully hidden diary the boarder had kept during his stay, even though he should never have written any of its contents down. What Walter finds is a scathing chronicle of one the most tumultuous years in German history, narrated by a secret agent on a deadly mission.

Sir Barnes Wallis CBE became a household name after the hit 1954 film The Dam Busters in which Michael Redgrave portrayed a shy, slightly abstracted genius at odds with bureaucracy. Yet this was a simplified picture of a complicated, mercurial man. Wallis' contribution to British aircrafts and weapons is legendary; from the R100 intercontinental airship and innovative aircrafts like the Wellesley and Wellington, to bombs that destroyed hitherto invulnerable targets, and variable-geometry aerodynes.

Inspired by the life of forgotten hero Haim Michael Klar, the number-one Amazon Charts best seller I Am Juden is the triumphant, epic tale of one man's incredible courage and resistance during the 20th century's darkest days. Jozef Siegler leads a perilous double life as an SS officer in the Krakow Ghetto and ultimately Auschwitz. His story is a tightrope walk through the Holocaust unlike any other. Nazi by day and Jewish resistance agent by night, any false move would result in instant death and exposure of his friends in the underground. 

Berlin, 1943: Ava Müller is a proud supporter of the German war effort, working for Joseph Goebbels alongside her father, a high-ranking official in the Reich. With her sister Hanna, a nurse, braving bombing raids to save lives, they are a model Nazi family. Until Ava discovers her parents and Hanna are secretly working for the resistance… Returning to their country home, Ava is shocked to find her childhood friend Eliana Goldman and her family hidden in the attic.

A wartime legacy. A lost love. A friendship to last a lifetime . . . 'An extraordinary book' Marie Claire A decades old secret . . . When Kat Jourdan discovers a priceless collection of Dior gowns hidden in her grandmother's remote cottage, she delves into the mystery of their origin, determined...

Including poems specially adapted into melody and song for this audiobook. One of The New York Times Best Audiobooks of 2024 A BBC ‘BETWEEN THE COVERS’ BOOK CLUB PICK 'I didn't want it to end' - Maggie O'Farrell 'Powerful . . . written with a calm, luminous precision' - Colm Tóibín An...