From the French Resistance to the Horrors of Hiroshima: Eight Globe-Spanning Books on World War II

VE Day this year seems to have a special resonance, reminding us both how terrible a world war is and how hard people fought for their freedom just eighty years ago against violent and predatory autocrats. “Lest we forget” is a phrase often spoken at remembrance services here in my home country of Australia and it’s a phrase that I think of when I’m standing in a bookshop in front of a stack of books labelled “WWII.”

To me, that stack isn’t just a genre—it’s a collection of remembrances about the people who either could have had or did have the courage to risk their lives for us—a future generation they would most likely never meet. That’s what drove me when I was writing The Mademoiselle Alliance, a novel about Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the only female leader of a French Resistance network.

I wanted people to know who she was and how extraordinarily brave she was so that she can be remembered by all of us, well into the future.

So if you have time to stop and remember this month, then I recommend picking up any of these books, which are set in different theaters of the Second World War, from France to Hong Kong, Britain, Japan, Australia and Germany.

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Ariel Lawhon, Code Name Hélène

I can’t help feeling a little protective of Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, who is something of a fellow Australian—although she was born in NZ, she moved to Australia when she was two years old and spent a good part of her adult life here. It’s full credit to Lawhon’s depth of research and writing skills that Nancy rises up from the pages of this book in all of her red-lipsticked, hard-drinking glory as she works clandestinely in France for Britain’s Special Operations Executive during WWII.

But she isn’t just bravado; Lawhon also shows us the vulnerable Nancy who’s terrified for her missing and adored husband as well as the ordinary Nancy who wants nothing more than a warm shower and a good night’s sleep—a woman who can also pull out a gun and protect her friends when she needs to. Riveting biographical fiction.

Emma Pei Yin, When Sleeping Women Wake

I was lucky enough to participate in a panel interview with Emma Pei Yin recently as we share the same publishers in Australia and the U.S. Afterwards, I was eager to read her debut novel, When Sleeping Women Wake. Emma spoke about trying to capture some of the many stories her grandfather had shared with her over the years about the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII.

Out of those stories has emerged a novel about three women—a mother, her daughter and their loyal maid who are separated by the war, who are drawn into the resistance despite the dangers, and who are also trying to find their way back to one another. I adored it, and while it isn’t published until June, it’s a hundred percent worth preordering.

Ian McEwan, Atonement

I can still remember the gut-punch of shock I felt near the end of Atonement when the twist was revealed. It’s rare that I feel such a visceral reaction to a novel; rarer still that I can recall any physical sensations from reading a book more than twenty years later.

What begins as a languorous story of two sisters one dull summer in an English country house becomes a masterpiece about storytelling, one that takes us through the grim reality of the British retreat from France in 1940 and into the decades that follow. This is one of my favorite books of all time.

Anne Sebba, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s

If you only want to read one nonfiction book about WWII, make it this one. Anne Sebba doesn’t cover the battles and the front-line heroics of the war; instead she tells the story of the Frenchwomen who had to deal with their German occupiers every day of their lives.

It’s hard to draw a line in the sand between collaborators and résistantes after reading this book because Sebba also considers survival, not just for the women, but for the families who depended on these women for food and shelter. When you finish this book, you’ll want to find out more about the different women Sebba brings to life, some of whom were famous, but many of whom are unknown.

Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

This is another book with a twist that cut me to the core. It’s a companion novel to Atkinson’s Life After Life in that it features the same English family, but it isn’t necessary to have read that one first. In this novel, Teddy is a WWII British bomber pilot and thus he and his fellow pilots have the shortest lives of almost anyone serving in the war.

All of them are desperate to stay alive until they reach the required number of flights to end their tour of duty. But Teddy, although terrified of dying, keeps going back for more, serving three tours by war’s end.

It’s Atkinson’s descriptions of life as a bomber pilot and her rumination on life, death and storytelling that make this one of the best books in the genre.

Sarah Helm, Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women

This isn’t an easy read—how could it be when it deals with the systematic imprisonment, torture and, in many cases, death of more than one hundred thousand women under the Nazi regime? But this book represents exactly why we should never forget: we don’t ever want anything like this to happen again.

Helm’s research is extensive as she tells both the story of a concentration camp many people have never heard of and the women who lived there, making birthday cakes out of breadcrumbs to keep each other mentally and physically alive until liberation finally came.

Anne Berest, The Postcard

I owe a debt of thanks to one of my Substack readers for telling me about this book, which I somehow missed when it was published a few years ago. This is an autofiction, with Berest novelizing the true story of a mysterious postcard arriving in the mailbox one day, a postcard that listed the names of four people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Berest’s narrator has no idea who sent the postcard nor why it’s been sent and thus the book unfolds, tracking both the main character’s and Beret’s quest to find answers. It’s completely gripping.

Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

This book is almost shockingly beautiful in the writing as it recounts the visit of war hero Aldred Leith to Hiroshima in 1947. Japan is a ruin, and the physical damage to the country is mirrored in the damaged psyches of the Japanese people Leith encounters, but also in the attitudes of the Allied victors, who are seemingly not content with winning; they must utterly humiliate the people they defeated too.

Soon Leith meets a young woman he falls in love with, but things are complicated by her youth and her parents, who loathe Leith’s more sympathetic attitude towards the Japanese people. War is as much in the aftermath as in the events themselves, as this book powerfully reminds us.

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The Mademoiselle Alliance by Natasha Lester is available via Random House.