Showing titles in 20th Century

Poland, 1941. Roza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, are the only surviving Jews in their town. They spend day and night hidden in a neighbour’s barn. Forbidden from making a sound, only the yellow bird from her mother’s stories can sing the melodies Shira composes in her head. Roza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language.

London 1917. As the Americans enter the war, there is renewed energy in the war effort. With husbands and sons fighting for freedom, the women of Harpers are left to tackle the day-to-day affairs at home and work. With Ben Harper away, Sally fears she is being followed by a mysterious woman. Who is she, and what does she want? Maggie Gibbs collapses seriously ill in the frontline hospitals and is brought back to England close to death. Can she be saved, and what does the future hold for her and her broken heart?

For the district nurses of Victory Walk, there's been little time to bask in the triumph of D-day as London is facing a new threat - the buzz bombs. Everyone is terrified, never knowing where the next one will strike. Into this tense atmosphere, new nurse Iris must make her mark. She’s had more experience of nursing than many, but since arriving in East London from the countryside, she has struggled to fit in with the other staff. Meanwhile, Alice is facing an agonising wait to hear if her boyfriend, Joe, has survived D-day.

Mrs. Braithwaite, self-appointed queen of her English village, finds herself dethroned, despised, and dismissed following her husband’s selfish divorce petition. Never deterred, the threat of a family secret being revealed sets off hot-foot to London to find the only person she has left - her clever daughter, Betty, who took work there at the first rumbles of war. But when she arrives, Betty’s landlord, the timid Mr. Norris, informs her that Betty hasn’t been home in days - with the chaos of the bombs, there’s no telling what might have befallen her.

Paris, 1944. “Traitor!” yells the crowd as they push me down onto a stool. “Nazi collaborator.” Tears blur my vision as the razor grazes my scalp, waves of blonde hair falling to the ground. As men paint a swastika across my face, I hold onto one small glimmer of hope. They have no idea who I am.

September, 1942. Jo Hardy, a 22-year-old ferry pilot, is delivering a Spitfire when she has the unnerving experience of someone shooting at her aircraft. A few days later, she hears that another ferry pilot has been killed when her aircraft crashed in the same area of Kent. Although the death has been attributed to ‘pilot error’, Jo is convinced there is a link between the two incidents. Jo takes her suspicions to Maisie Dobbs.

As the Great War continues to take its toll, headstrong 21-year-old Emily Bryce is determined to contribute to the war effort. She is convinced by a cheeky and handsome Australian pilot that she can do more, and it is not long before she falls in love with him and accepts his proposal of marriage. When he is sent back to the front, Emily volunteers as a “land girl,” tending to the neglected grounds of a large Devonshire estate. It’s here that Emily discovers the long-forgotten journals of a medicine woman who devoted her life to her herbal garden.

Germany, 1939: Annaliese is a doctor’s wife, living in an elegant grey stone house with ivy creeping over the balcony. But when her husband is ordered to work at the Dachau labor camp, her ordinary life is turned upside down by the horrors of war. And Annaliese finds herself in grave danger when she dares to fight for love and freedom. America, 1989: Turning the pages of the newspaper, Annaliese gasps when she recognizes the face of a man she thought she’d never see again....

1942. After her fiancé is killed in a pogrom, Hannah Martel narrowly escapes Nazi Germany and takes temporary refuge with her cousin, Lily, in Brussels. Safe for now, but desperate to flee Europe for good, Hannah joins the Sapphire Line: a secret resistance network led by a mysterious woman named Micheline and her enigmatic brother, Mateo. Freedom is tantalisingly close. But when Lily's family are arrested and slated for deportation to Auschwitz, Hannah finds herself torn between her loyalties and her own determination to escape.

Paris, 1938. The last sigh of summer before the war. As Australian journalist Charlotte ‘Charlie' James alights at the Gare du Nord, ready to start her role as correspondent for The Times, Paris is in turmoil as talk of war becomes increasingly strident. Charlie is chasing her first big scoop, needing to prove to her boss that she can do this job as well as, if not better than, her male counterparts. And the best way to forge the necessary contacts quickly is to make the well-connected expats, Lord and Lady Ashworth, her business.

In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-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.

Tensions are high across Europe in the beginning of May 1940. Hitler’s forces have overrun Norway, and it’s only a matter of time before his focus turns to France. When Evelyn Ainsworth is sent to Brussels, she understands all too well the risk of remaining too long. The MI6 agent’s goal is to get in, pick up a package, meet with her Soviet contact, and get out again as quickly as possible. But even the best laid plans can go awry.

It is summer 1941 and the country is still at war. In the Devon village of Ashleigh, however, evacuees from the London blitz are living in an atmosphere of rural peacefulness, although Daisy Ricketts of Bermondsey isn't sure if she'll ever get on with carping Mrs Mumford, the subject of whispers because of her husband's mysterious disappearance. David, the elder son of Tommy and Vi Adams, meets Kate Trimble, a cockney girl from Camberwell who has just arrived in Ashleigh with her aunt.

Zwei Leben - ein Schicksal Die vielleicht beliebteste Trilogie von Jeffrey Archer: vom Autor so überarbeitet, wie sie in seiner Vision schon immer hätte sein sollen. Nach russischer Kriegsgefangenschaft gelangt Abel Rosnovski, unehelicher Sohn eines polnischen Adligen, mit einem Auswandererschiff nach Amerika. Dort arbeitet er sich zum Hotelmanager hoch. Sein Schicksal kreuzt sich dramatisch mit dem von William Lowell Kane, Erbe eines gigantischen Vermögens, der zum Bankpräsidenten werden soll.

Oscar Hammerstein is asked to write the lyrics to a musical based on the life of Maria von Trapp: a novice nun sent to teach a widowed baron's sickly child. Yet much of Maria's life will have to be reinvented for THE SOUND OF MUSIC. When Maria sees the script that is supposedly based on her life, she becomes so incensed that she sets off to confront Hammerstein in person. Told that he's busy, she is asked to express her concerns to his secretary Fran instead. The pair strike up an unlikely friendship as Maria tells Fran about her life.

1940. In a world newly burning with war, and in spite of her American family’s wishes, Virginia d’Albert-Lake decides to stay in occupied France with her French husband. She’s sure that if they keep their heads down, they’ll survive. But is surviving enough? Nineteen-year-old Violette Szabo has seen the Nazis’ evil up close and is desperate to fight them. But when she meets the man who’ll change her life only for tragedy to strike, Violette’s adrift.

As the world teeters on the brink of WWII, Eliza Lavery is alone in the world after her fiancé, Davey, was lost in the Irish Civil War. But a chance meeting on the wild beauty of Ballmastocker Bay could change everything. Eight decades later, troubled by her future, Saoirse O’Donnell walks on the pink sands of Bermuda’s Horseshoe Bay. When she uncovers a connection to Eliza, all those years before, she hears a story that promises to influence her own heart and her own choice – but also to reveal a long-buried secret.

There was rarely a time when Phoenix Yuan-Whyller’s mother, Rain, didn’t live with her. Even when Phoenix got married, Rain, who followed her from China to Toronto, came to share Phoenix’s life. Now at the age of eighty-three, Rain’s unexpected death ushers in a heartrending separation.

To what lengths will the British go to smuggle a secret weapon into Nazi Germany? An unmissable Second World War thriller from bestseller Alex Gerlis. Hiding in the horror of Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto with his family, scientist Roman Loszynski has a secret: a means of making aerial bombing raids frighteningly accurate. Codenamed Tatra, it could change the course of the war. With British agent Jack Miller now in Switzerland, back in Berlin undercover spy Sophia von Naundorf is determined to escape Germany come what may.

It is freezing 38 degrees. Stalingrad, the winter of 1942-1943. A chilling wind sweeps over the plains, slinging ice crystals into our faces. We are marching past thousands of frozen bodies. The SS-general is marching in front of the convoy, silently and withdrawn. He is angry. We realized that a while back. A fanatic who wishes to die in battle. And the SS-general wants to take as many to die with him as possible. "MOVING STUDY IN THE STALINGRAD CAMPAIGN...