by Kristin Hannah (2015)
Two sisters in France embark on their own dangerous paths toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France, celebrating the resilience of women during World War II.
Markus Zusak
Narrated by Death, this unforgettable story follows nine-year-old Liesel Meminger living with a foster family outside Munich during World War II, who discovers solace and resistance by stealing books and sharing them with a hidden Jewish fist-fighter.
Anthony Doerr
Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo. In a German mining town, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up enchanted by a crude radio he finds that brings him news and stories from far off places.
Harry Turtledove
As World War II escalates, North America is faced with violence on all sides--Confederate attacks on northern cities, Canadian insurgents, and a Japanese assault on the Hawaiian islands--as, in the South, ex-slaves are forced to build their own concentration camps, and Vice President La Follette takes over from the dead president while Franklin Roosevelt builds his own power base.
Amy J. Elias
"In Sublime Desire, Amy J. Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction written since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty. Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime - for awe, certainty, and belief."--BOOK JACKET.