Life After Life

Stephen Wraysford’s prewar love affair in Amiens is swallowed by the Somme, the tunnels under the Western Front, and the unmaking of a generation. A later strand follows his granddaughter as she tries to recover what the Great War buried.

In the last months of World War II, a burned, nameless man lies in a ruined Italian villa with a Canadian nurse, a maimed thief, and a Sikh sapper—while morphine brings back the North African desert and a love affair that crossed maps and sides. Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-winning novel is WWII historical fiction of occupation, exploration, and the wreckage four people carry out of the war.

A blind French girl and a German boy’s paths converge in occupied Saint-Malo during World War II.

In July 1942 Paris, ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski is arrested with her parents in the Vél' d'Hiv roundup—but not before she locks her little brother in a cupboard, promising to come back. In 2002, American journalist Julia Jarmond, assigned to the sixtieth anniversary, traces Sarah’s apartment into her own French in-laws’ history. Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel is WWII dual-timeline historical fiction of occupied Paris, a child’s promise, and a family secret that will not stay buried.

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.

A nonverbal girl’s life in Nazi-era Austria, told with unusual power (Walter Scott Prize 2026).