These Days

In the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misreads a moment between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, and a false accusation follows them into World War II—Dunkirk, a London hospital, and a guilt Briony will spend a lifetime trying to rewrite. Ian McEwan’s novel is literary historical fiction of class, war, and the stories we tell to atone.

In 1943, Tasmanian surgeon Dorrigo Evans tries to keep Australian POWs alive on the Thai-Burma Death Railway—cholera, beatings, and a Japanese command that measures men in sleepers laid—while the memory of an affair with his uncle’s wife follows him from the jungle into a decorated postwar life he cannot inhabit. Richard Flanagan’s 2013 novel is WWII military historical fiction of the Pacific war, and the Booker Prize winner readers still search by its long title.

A female SOE agent’s wartime courage and Cold War aftershocks (Walter Scott Prize 2016).

A girl steals books in Nazi Germany; Death narrates a story of words and survival.

In the autumn of 1941 a German U-boat commander—the Old Man—and his crew leave the French coast for another Battle of the Atlantic patrol, hunting supply ships through storms while destroyers and depth charges hunt them. Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s 1973 novel (English translation) is World War II military historical fiction of that boat: a war correspondent aboard, weeks underwater, and a crew the Atlantic is more likely to keep than to send home.

Nine-year-old Bruno is moved from Berlin to a lonely house beside a fence his sister calls Out-With; from his window he sees people in striped pajamas, and he makes a secret friend named Shmuel on the other side. John Boyne’s 2006 novel is WWII Holocaust historical fiction told as a child’s fable: a friendship through the wire at Auschwitz, and a title readers still search by name.