Tag Archives: WWII
** By Blood by Ellen Ullman
By Blood starts with a wonderful premise: a mysteriously disgraced professor rents a small office to write a masterpiece but instead discovers that he can hear perfectly the consultations of the psychotherapist next door and gets taken into the story … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
*** A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead
A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France is indeed an extraordinary story, of a few hundred French women in the Resistance who were detained in French prisons by the French government and … Continue reading
Filed under Non fiction
*** Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
I’m not a fan of history books, and I’m not a WWII buff, but I liked Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption a lot. Written by the author of Seabiscuit, which I also loved, this … Continue reading
Filed under True story
*** The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah
The Last Brother is not a happy story, marrying natural disaster, domestic abuse, and the holocaust, but it’s not depressing, somehow, and it’s not a tearjerker either. It’s the story of a young boy told by the old man he … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
** Great House by Nicole Krauss
Great House is a novel but is built like a collection of short stories, all connected by an immense desk that has travelled a lot through a troubled 20th century. The impressionistic stories make it difficult to discern the overall … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld
Even as I started reading Blooms of Darkness I was prepared not to like it. Do we need another dark WWII story of Jews being massacred in the ghetto? Can we really believe the story of a young boy who’s … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
The Art Student’s War by Brad Leithhauser
The Art Student’s War is the story of a woman who grows up in Detroit and, hence the title, is asked to draw portraits of wounded soldiers returning from WWII — an interesting premise. And indeed, the beginning of the … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
The Little Stranger tells the story of an English gentry family, ruined and decaying along with its castle in right after WWII. The local physician, whose mother was a maid for the family, fascinated by their way of life and … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Every Man Dies Alone, a sad novel about life in Germany during World War II, was inspired by the real story of a couple who decided to fight against the Nazis by waging a minuscule campaign of dropping postcards attacking … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
La’s Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander Mc Call Smith
La’s Orchestra Saves the World is the latest offering from Alexander McCall Smith, the prolific author of Isabel Dalhousie and the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and as always it reads well, but the trite plot is hard to … Continue reading
Filed under New fiction
