The Best WWII Novels

Vasily Grossman · 1960 · 871 pages

The War and Peace of the twentieth century — one extended family swept through Stalingrad, the Gulag, and the Shoah.

Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · 275 pages

Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time, drifting between his experiences as a POW in Dresden and an alien zoo.

Lothar-Günther Buchheim · 1973 · 560 pages

A novel of one U-boat patrol in 1941, written by a war correspondent who sailed on the real thing.

Joseph Heller · 1961 · 453 pages

A darkly comic novel about a bombardier trapped by the absurd logic of military bureaucracy.

Nicholas Monsarrat · 1951 · 416 pages

The war of the Atlantic escorts told through one corvette and her crew, by an officer who lived it.

Herman Wouk · 1951 · 537 pages

Officers of a Pacific minesweeper relieve their unstable captain during a typhoon — and face court-martial for it.

Herman Wouk · 1978 · 1042 pages

The sequel to The Winds of War carries the Henry family from Pearl Harbor through Midway, Leyte Gulf, and Auschwitz.

James Clavell · 1962 · 479 pages

An American corporal thrives by trading in Changi POW camp, where officers starve and rank means nothing.

Kimberly Brubaker Bradley · 2015 · 316 pages

A disabled girl escapes her abusive mother in the London evacuation and discovers, in wartime Kent, what care feels like.

Michelle Magorian · 1981 · 318 pages

A battered London evacuee is billeted on a gruff widower, and two broken people mend each other as the bombs begin.

Herman Wouk · 1971 · 885 pages

An American naval officer and his family are swept up in the opening years of the war, from Hitler's invasion.

Anthony Doerr · 2014 · 531 pages

A blind French girl and a German boy's paths converge in occupied Saint-Malo during the Allied bombardment.

Thomas Keneally · 1982 · 400 pages

The documentary novel of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi profiteer who saved 1,200 Jews.

Markus Zusak · 2005 · 552 pages

Death narrates the story of a German girl, her foster family, and the Jewish man hidden in their basement.

Lois Lowry · 1989 · 137 pages

Ten-year-old Annemarie helps smuggle her Jewish best friend's family to Sweden during the rescue of the Danish Jews.

David Benioff · 2008 · 258 pages

Two young men in besieged Leningrad are given an absurd errand to save their lives: find a dozen eggs for a colonel's daughter's wedding cake.

Vasily Grossman · 1952 · 1088 pages

The prequel to Life and Fate — the Shaposhnikov family as the German tide reaches the Volga — finally published uncensored in 2019.

J.G. Ballard · 1984 · 351 pages

A British boy comes of age in a Japanese internment camp outside Shanghai — drawn from Ballard's own childhood.

Ian McEwan · 2001 · 351 pages

A child's lie destroys two lives; the retreat to Dunkirk gives the lie its terrible setting.

Ruta Sepetys · 2016 · 391 pages

Four refugees converge on the Wilhelm Gustloff, the evacuation ship whose sinking killed nine thousand — six times the Titanic.

James Jones · 1962 · 510 pages

A novel following an Army rifle company during the Guadalcanal campaign — the second volume of Jones's war.

James Jones · 1951 · 861 pages

Life in an Army infantry company in Hawaii in the months before Pearl Harbor.

Kristin Hannah · 2015 · 440 pages

Two French sisters resist the German occupation in their own ways — one by hiding a child, one by guiding airmen over the Pyrenees.

Kate Quinn · 2021 · 656 pages

Three women of Bletchley Park, a broken friendship, and a traitor hunt on the eve of a royal wedding.

Michael Ondaatje · 1992 · 305 pages

A burned man in a ruined Italian villa, a Canadian nurse, a Sikh sapper, and a thief — four lives wrecked by the desert war.

Kate Atkinson · 2013 · 529 pages

Ursula Todd lives the twentieth century over and over — and the Blitz, in every version, is where the novel beats hardest.

Alistair MacLean · 1955 · 320 pages

One Arctic convoy escort driven past breaking point on the Murmansk run.

C.S. Forester · 1955 · 256 pages

Forty-eight sleepless hours in the head of a destroyer captain shepherding a convoy through the wolfpacks.

Helen Dunmore · 2001 · 294 pages

One Leningrad family endures the first siege winter — bread ration by bread ration.

Laurent Binet · 2010 · 327 pages

Two parachutists are sent to kill Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution — while the author argues with himself about inventing any of it.