Second World War fiction

  • The golden gate

    £16.99

    Berkeley, California 1944: A former presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms at the opulent Claremont Hotel. A rich industrialist, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of adversaries. But Detective Al Sullivan’s investigation brings up the spectre of another tragedy at the Claremont ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the wealthy and influential Bainbridge family. Some say she haunts the Claremont still. The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now adults: Iris’s sister, Isabella, and her cousins Cassie and Nicole. Determined not to let anything distract him from the truth, Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion.

  • Bournville

    £9.99

    In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For 11-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it’s the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She’ll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave. As we travel through 75 years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the Internet, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary’s family – and their country – closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?

  • Eternal

    £9.99

    What war destroys, only love can heal. Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta’s heart. But in the autumn of 1937, all of that begins to change as Mussolini asserts his power, aligning Italy’s Fascists with Hitler’s Nazis and altering the very laws that govern Rome. In time, everything that the three hold dear – their families, their homes, and their connection to one another – is tested in ways they never could have imagined.

  • SS-GB

    £9.99

    It is 1941. British Command has surrendered to the Nazis. Churchill has been executed, the King is in the Tower and the SS are in Whitehall. For nine months Britain has been occupied and it’s now blitzed, depressed and dingy country.

  • Suite Francaise

    £9.99

    ‘Suite Francaise’ is a lost masterpiece written in World War II France, telling the spellbinding story of a group of characters living under Nazi occupation.

  • The English F?hrer

    £9.99

    Autumn 1945. Off the east coast of England, a Japanese sub surfaces, unloads its mysterious cargo, then blows itself to pieces. Former spy Professor Tom Wilde is enjoying peacetime in Cambridge, settling back into teaching and family life. Until a call from senior MI5 boss Lord Templeman brings him out of retirement. A nearby village has been locked down by the military, its residents blighted by a deadly illness. No one is allowed in or out. There are rumours the Nazi machine is still operational, with links to Unit 731, a notorious Japanese biological warfare research laboratory. But how could they possibly be plotting on British soil – and why? What’s more, Wilde and Templeman’s names are discovered on a Gestapo kill list. And after a series of assassinations an unthinkable question emerges: could an Englishman be behind the plot?

  • The people immortal

    £12.99

    One of Grossman’s three great war novels, ‘The People Immortal’ is both a work of fiction and an important contribution to the Soviet war effort. Set during the catastrophic defeats of the war’s first months, it tracks a Red Army regiment that wins a minor victory in eastern Belorussia but fails to exploit this success. A battalion is then entrusted with the task of slowing the German advance, and eventually encircled, before ultimately breaking out and joining with the rest of the Soviet forces.

  • The girl with the red hair

    £18.99

    1940, Amsterdam. You’re nineteen years old. The war has stolen your future and your country is under siege. The people you love are no longer safe. Will you stand aside as the menace of Nazi evil tightens its grip on your homeland? Or do you unleash your fury, joining forces with your enemies’ enemies, plotting to strike? Because if not you, then who? You’re drawn deep into a web of plots, disguises and assassinations. The Resistance trained you for this. You flash your enemies a smile and beckon them closer. Little do they know you’ve grown used to the weight of a gun in your hand. Soon they will all know your name.

  • The midnight news

    £16.99

    It is 1940 and bombs are falling on London. Watching from her attic window, Charlotte sees enemy planes coming in over the city, and her neighbours’ homes destroyed. Still grieving her beloved brother who never returned from France, Charlotte has moved away from her overbearing family and built a new life for herself. She works as a typist for the Ministry of Information, rents a room on the top floor of Mrs Callaghan’s ramshackle house, and shares gin and confidences with her best friend, Elena. Charlotte comes to fear that there is something – or someone – else at work. Who is the shadow man who seems to be following her? Or is her mind playing tricks on her again?

  • The Lock-Up SIGNED!

    £16.99

    1950s Dublin, in a lock-up garage in the city, the body of a young woman is discovered, an apparent suicide. But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play. The victim’s sister, a newspaper reporter from London, returns to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth. But, as they explore her links to a wealthy German family in County Wicklow, and to investigative work she may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery. With relations between the two men increasingly strained, and their investigation taking them back to the final days of the Second World War, can they join the pieces of a hidden puzzle?

  • The twilight world

    £9.99

    At the end of 1944, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial army’s return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs. There is only one rule. You are forbidden to die by your own hand. In the event of your capture by the enemy, you are to give them all the misleading information you can. So began Onoda’s long campaign, during which he became fluent in the hidden language of the jungle. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades – until eventually time itself seemed to melt away. All the while Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war, at once surreal and tragic, at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making.

  • The walled garden

    £14.99

    It is 1946 and in the village of Oakbourne the men are home from the war. Their bodies are healing but their psychological wounds run deep. Everyone is scarred – those who fought and those left behind. Alice Rayne is married to Stephen, heir to crumbling Oakbourne Hall. Once a sweet, gentle man, he has returned a bitter and angry stranger, destroyed by what he has seen and done, tormented by secrets Alice can only guess at. Lonely and increasingly afraid of the man her husband has become, Alice must try to pick up the pieces of her marriage and save Oakbourne Hall from total collapse. She begins with the walled garden and, as it starts to bear fruit, she finds herself drawn into a new, forbidden love.

Nomad Books