By Amanda Hodgkinson

“Leaving Poland for England at the end of World War II, Silvana is accompanied by eight-year-old, near-feral Aurek, with whom she shares traumatic wartime memories that set them apart from her husband, who has remade himself as an Englishman to forget the past (From the Publisher).”

By Nancu Kricorian

After surviving the genocide in their homeland, Maral Pegorian and her family arrive in Paris to start a new life, but they soon realize that the Nazi Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured.

By Iain Lawrence

In the spring of 1943, sixteen-year-old Kak, desperate to escape his abusive parents, lies about his age to enlist in the Canadian Air Force and soon finds himself based in England as part of a crew flying bombing raids over Germany.

By Kristin Harmel
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Escaping from Paris in 1942 after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew, a graduate student finds refuge in a small mountain town, where she forges identity documents to help hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis.

By Catherine Ryan Hyde

The son of prosperous landowners in rural California befriends the sons of field workers who must contend with the changes that occur after the bombing of Pearl Harbor scatters one each into the army, an internment camp and into hiding.

By Jane Yolen

A retelling of the Sleeping Beauty tale finds Briar Rose living in forests patrolled by the German army during World War II in a dark tale of the Holocaust.

By David L. Robbins

Set against the backdrop of the Los Banos prison raid––one of the most daringepisodes of World War II - Broken Jewel tells a powerful story of war, love, and survival.

By Julie Otsuka
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, August 28, 2012.  1 PM & 7:30 PM.

Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.

By Herman Wouk
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life-and mutiny-on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II. In the intervening half century, The Caine Mutiny has become a perennial favorite of readers young and old, has sold millions of copies throughout the world, and has achieved the status of a modern classic.

By Joseph Heller
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, September 29, 2015. 1:30 PM.

Depicts the struggles of a U.S. airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II base.

Became the movie: Catch 22.

By Heather Morris

A novel based on a true story follows a Russian woman who is forced by a concentration-camp commandant to become his lover and is subsequently sent to Siberia after being found guilty of collaborating with the enemy.

By David Benioff
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Documenting his grandparents' experiences during the siege of Leningrad, a young writer learns his grandfather's story about how a military deserter and he tried to secure pardons by gathering hard–to–find ingredients for a powerful colonel's daughter's wedding cake.

By David R. Gillham
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, January 28, 2014.  1:30 PM.

Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier's wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover's family. 

By Elizabeth Wein
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director
With Pam Strudler, Librarian, Sharon Long, Teen Librarian

Tuesday, July 22, 2014. 1:30 PM.

In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage and great courage as she relates what she must do to survive.

By A. J. Pearce
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

An adventurous young woman takes a typist job to assist the war effort and lands in the employ of a renowned advice columnist before she begins secretly replying to heart – wrenching letters rejected as unsuitable.

By Kate Quinn

Known as Lady Death– –a lethal hunter of Nazis– – Mila Pavlichenko, sent to America on a goodwill tour, forms an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a connection with a silent fellow sniper, offering her a chance at happiness until her past returns with a vengeance.

By Alison Pick

“Holding onto the hope that he and his family will be able to weather the oncoming Nazi occupation, Pavel Bauer, a fiercely patriotic secular Jew, finds his world unraveling as his government, business partners, and neighbors turn their backs on him and his family (From the Publisher).”

By Geling Yan

“Hiding in an American church as the Japanese invade Nanking, Shujuan and a group of terrified schoolgirls find their lives in increasing danger when thirteen courtesans from a nearby brothel seek refuge at the church (From the Publisher).”

By Sherri L. Smith

During World War II, a light–skinned African American girl "passes" for white in order to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

By Danielle Steel
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

After her brother is wounded in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Audrey and her best friend Lizzie enlist in the army as flight nurses.

By Kristin Harmel
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Lisa V., Library Clerk

Raised in the unforgiving wilderness of eastern Europe after being kidnapped, a young German woman, in 1941, vows to teach a group of Jews fleeing the Nazi terror how to survive in the forest until she is betrayed as her past and present collide.

By Sophie Littlefield

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lucy Takeda and her mother, Miyako, are rounded up and taken to the Manzanar prison camp where they endure abuse and harsh living conditions until Miyako makes the ultimate sacrifice.

By Tan Twan Eng

Set in Penang, 1939, this book presents a story of betrayal, barbaric cruelty, steadfast courage and enduring love.

By Alan Furst

Members of the French Resistance network young and old, aristocrats and schoolteachers, defiant heroes and ordinary people all engaged in clandestine actions in the cause of freedom. From the secret hotels and Nazi-infested nightclubs of Paris to the villages of Rouen and Orleans. An action-packed story of romance, intrigue, spies, bravery, and air battles.

By Jamie Ford
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti–Japanese sentiment.

By Catherine Banner
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Four generations of women on a Mediterranean island fight to safeguard their family against the forces of history and bitterness that divide them from World War I through the 2008 recession.

By Kate Quinn

Stranded behind enemy lines, brave bomber pilot Nina Markova becomes the prey of a lethal Nazi murderess known as the Huntress and joins forces with a Nazi hunter and British war correspondent to find her before she finds them.

By Julie Orringer
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

Orringer’s first novel is a grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war in 1937 Paris.

By Biyi Bandele-Thomas

A tale inspired by the service of legendary “Chindit” British-African solider who fought on the Asian front during World War II finds fourteen-year-old Ali Banana, a former blacksmith’s apprentice, struggling to outmaneuver Japanese snipers when he is ordered to cross enemy lines in the Burmese jungle.

By Jennifer Ryan
Recommended By Lisa V., Library Clerk

An indebted young widow, a freedom-seeking kitchen maid, the wife of a wealthy but unkind man and a trained chef navigating sexism compete for a once-in-a-lifetime spot hosting a BBC cooking program during World War II.

By Madeline Martin
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

Taking a job in a London bookshop just as the Blitz begins, Grace finds comfort in the power of words, storytelling and community as the bookshop becomes one of the only remaining properties to survive the bombings.

By Nathacha Appanah
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Unaware of how World War II is impacting the world outside of his Indian Ocean island home, where oppression and survival are daily struggles, nine–year–old Raj meets a Jewish refugee with whom he flees into further danger.

By Weina Dai Randel
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

In Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1940, when a young heiress and owner of a nightclub meets a penniless Jewish refugee driven out of Germany, they are drawn together by fate and the freedom of music, but their love and survival grow more desperate as the war escalates.

By Susan Meissner
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

A German-American teen finds her life and identity turned upside-down when her father is accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, triggering her family's forced relocation into a Texas internment camp.

By Julia Kelly
Recommended By Adrienne Rein, Library Clerk

Unable to confront the challenges in her own life, Cara Hargraves immerses herself in work for her antiques–dealer boss, uncovering relics from the life of World War II British "Gunner Girl" Louise Keene and her complicated relationship with a man named Paul.

By Ellen Feldman

Living and working in a bombed–out Berlin, Millie Mosbach must come to terms with a past decision made in a moment of crisis with the help of a mysterious man who is surprisingly understanding of her.

By Ellen Feldman
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Millie (Meike) Mosbach and her brother David, manage to escape to the States just before Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister in Berlin. Now they are both back in their former hometown, haunted by ghosts and hoping against hope to find their family.

By Julie Berry
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Meeting in a World War II-era Manhattan hotel for a forbidden tryst, immortals Ares and Aphrodite are caught by the latter's jealous husband before she defends her actions by imparting the tale of four young humans who became connected during World War I.

By Debra Dean

In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad.

By Alan Furst
Series Night Soldiers 109
Recommended By Sue Ann R., Head of Children's Services

"Arriving in Paris on the eve of the Munich Appeasement in 1938, Hollywood star Frederic Stahl is unwittingly entangled in the region's shifting political currents when he discovers that his latest film is linked to the destinies of fascists, German Nazis, and Hollywood publicists (From the Publisher)."

By Melanie Benjamin

The director of the luxurious Hotel Ritz in occupied Paris and his courageous American wife, Blanche Auzello, risk their marriage and lives to support the French Resistance during World War II.

By Sara Young
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“One of the lesser-known aspects of the Nazi regime was the Lebensborn program, which promoted the expansion of the "master race" by encouraging German women and those who were racially "pure" in its occupied countries to bear as many children as possible. Young explores the experiences of these women in her fictional story of Cyrla… Unbeknown to the officials, Cyrla is half Jewish and must walk a tightrope as she plots her escape (Library Journal).”

By Richard Flanagan

A novel of love and war that traces the life of one man--an Australian surgeon--from a prisoner-of-war camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway during World War II, up to the present.

By Sarah Waters
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian

A tale set in World War II London finds a rescue worker struggling for composure after a bombing, a young woman longing for her soldier lover, and a convict who watches a battle through the bars of his window.

By Kristin Hannah
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Rosalia White, Library Clerk, Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Reunited when the elder's husband is sent to fight in World War II, French sisters Vianne and Isabelle find their bond as well as their respective beliefs tested by a world that changes in horrific ways.

By Michael Lavigne
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

When Michael’s father, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, hands him a box of moldy old journals, an amazing adventure begins – one that takes the reader from the concentration camps of Poland to a love story in Palestine, from a cancer ward in New Jersey to a hopeless marriage in San Francisco. While reading the journals, Michael becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his father.

By Ronald H. Balson
Recommended By Susan L., Library Page
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, April 25, 2017. 1:30 PM.

Elliot Rosenzweig, a wealthy Chicago philanthropist, is attending opening night at the opera. Ben Solomon, a retired Polish immigrant, makes his way through the crowd and shoves a gun in Rosenzweig's face, denouncing him as former SS officer. Rosenzweig uses his enormous influence to get Solomon released from jail, but Solomon commences a relentless pursuit to bring Rosenzweig before the courts to answer for war crimes.

By Peter Behrens

A family saga spanning half a century in the lives of a restless and ambitious clan starts with the story of backwoods youth-turned-railroad magnate Joe O'Brien, who becomes the patriarch of a family that sees the first airplanes, two world wars, and the election of JFK.

By P.T. Deuterman

Their military careers forever transformed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, Navy nurse Glory grieves for the loss of her husband while ship officer Marsh battles his way toward Leyte Gulf and fighter pilot Mick struggles with the drinking problem for which he was grounded.

By Charles Belfoure
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, June 28, 2016. 1:30 PM.

A Parisian architect is paid handsomely to devise secret hiding spaces for Jews in his Nazi-occupied country but struggles with risking his life for a cause he is ambivalent towards, until a personal failure brings home their suffering.