Books like 'The Drowned and the Saved'
Readers who enjoyed The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical psychological 20th century ww2 war classics politics religion university fascism
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Death Is My Trade by Robert Merle
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe story begins in 1913, when Rudolf Lang is 13 years old. His parents give him a harsh catholic education, which is very badly accepted by Rudolf. His unstable father, with whom the young Lang has an awkward relationship, wants Rudolf to become priest. At the age of fifteen, Lang starts his military career which eventually leads him to the post of commandant of Auschwitz in 1943... -
![Chess Story by Stefan Zweig]()
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsChess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological... -
![The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom]()
The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsWhen sixteen-year-old Alfred Rosenberg is called into his headmaster’s office for anti-Semitic remarks he made during a school speech, he is forced, as punishment, to memorize passages about Spinoza from the autobiography of the German poet Goethe. Rosenberg is stunned to discover that Goethe, his idol, was a great admirer of the Jewish seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza... -
![The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett]()
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsNobel prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. He gives expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature... -
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![The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, Rajendra A. Chitnis]()
The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, Rajendra A. Chitnis
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratings“The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.”—Giovanni Papini It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and pervades this tragicomic novel of anxiety and evil set amid the horrors of World War II... -
![Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell]()
Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe dazzling second volume of The Alexandria Quartet--an enthralling and deeply disturbing work of gorgeous surfaces and endless deceptions.In Alexandra, in the years before the Second World War, an exiled Irish schoolteacher seeks to unravel his sexual obsession with two women: the tubercular cafe dancer, Melissa, and Justine, the alluring Jewish wife of a wealthy Coptic Christian... -
![The Captain by Jan de Hartog]()
The Captain by Jan de Hartog
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe book centers around the specialized Ocean tugboat trade. In 1940 Harinxma, then a young tugboat officer, escapes to Britain. The Kwel company has managed to get away much of its fleet and personnel, one jump ahead of the advancing Germans, and sets up to continue operations from London... -
![The Ogre by Michel Tournier]()
The Ogre by Michel Tournier
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAn international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum... -
![The Drinker by Hans Fallada]()
The Drinker by Hans Fallada
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis astonishing, autobiographical tour de force was written by Hans Fallada in an encrypted notebook while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum. Discovered after his death, it tells the tale—often fierce, often poignant, often extremely funny—of a small businessman losing control as he fights valiantly to blot out an increasingly oppressive society... -
![Fatelessness by Imre Kertész]()
Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAt the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew... -
![Famous Last Words by Timothy Findley]()
Famous Last Words by Timothy Findley
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn the final days of the Second World War, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley scrawls his desperate account on the walls and ceilings of his ice-cold prison high in the Austrian Alps. Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament - the sordid truth that he alone possessed... -
![The Skin by Curzio Malaparte]()
The Skin by Curzio Malaparte
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThis is the first unexpurgated English edition of Curzio Malaparte’s legendary work The Skin. The book begins in 1943, with Allied forces cementing their grip on the devastated city of Naples. The sometime Fascist and ever-resourceful Curzio Malaparte is working with the Americans as a liaison officer. He looks after Colonel Jack Hamilton, “a Christian gentleman . . -
![One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes]()
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIt's a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated... -
![The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue by W.H. Auden]()
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue by W.H. Auden
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe first critical edition of a poem that named an eraWhen it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named... -
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![The Secret Miracle by Jorge Luis Borges]()
The Secret Miracle by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"The Secret Miracle" is a short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It was first published in the magazine Sur in February 1943. The main character of the story is a playwright named Jaromir Hladík, who is living in Prague when it is occupied by the Nazis during World War II... -
![One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, จักรแก้ว ตนุนาถ]()
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, จักรแก้ว ตนุนาถ
Rated: 3.97 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsThe only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression... -
![The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre]()
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSet in France during the days immediately before World War II, this is the story of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy obsessed with the idea of freedom. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton... -
![Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll]()
Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHeinrich Böll's well-known, vehement opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of Robert Faehmel. After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at the end of the war. He adheres to a rigorous schedule, including a daily game of billiards... -
![All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski]()
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family’s manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish twelve-year-old son, Peter... -
![The Conformist by Alberto Moravia]()
The Conformist by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSecrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years... -
![The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry]()
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the finest book to come out of Europe this year," The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is acclaimed Irish playwright Sebastian Barry's lyrical tale of a fugitive everyman. For Eneas McNulty, a happy, innocent childhood in County Sligo in the early 1900s gives way to an Ireland wracked by violence and conflict... -
![The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir]()
The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsJean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his lover, Helene, to die. He is the one who sent her on the mission that led to her death, and before morning, he must ultimately decide how many others to send to a similar fate... -
![Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt]()
Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA deeply compelling and poignant story about the tragic lessons of war and the endurance of memory.In the last months of World War II, a man wakes in a field in a country he does not know. Injured and with only flashes of memory coming back to him, he pulls himself to his feet and starts to walk, setting out on an extraordinary journey in search of his home, his past, and himself.His name is Owen... -
![The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick]()
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDepicting both the horrors of the Holocaust and the lifetime of emptiness that pursues a survivor, 'The Shawl' and 'Rosa' recall the psychological and emotional scars of those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis... -
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![Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll]()
Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll, an inventive & sardonic portrayal of the effects of the Nazi period on a group of ordinary people. Weaving together the stories of a diverse array of characters, Boll explores the often bizarre & always very human courses chosen by people attempting to survive in a world marked by political madness, absurdity & destruction... -
![Amongst Women by John McGahern]()
Amongst Women by John McGahern
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMoran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerilla leader in the War of Independence. Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past... -
![Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz]()
Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsGombrowicz's strange, bracing final novel probes the divide between young and old while providing a grotesque evocation of obsession. While recuperating from wartime Warsaw in the Polish countryside, the unnamed narrator and his friend, Fryderyk, attempt to force amour between two local youths, Karol and Henia, as a kind of a lewd entertainment... -
![Youth Without Youth & Other Novellas (Romanian Literature & Thought in Translation) by Mircea Eliade]()
Youth Without Youth & Other Novellas (Romanian Literature & Thought in Translation) by Mircea Eliade
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsBucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history - a man who thought his life was over - lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity... -
![The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell]()
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsNamed one of the "100 Best Books of the Decade" by The Times of London "Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened." A former Nazi officer, Dr. Maximilien Aue has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France... -
![American Pastoral by Philip Roth]()
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsPulitzer Prize Winner (1998)In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss... -
![The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas]()
The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIt is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them... -
![Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker]()
Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker
Rated: 3.81 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of the most remarkable novels of the Holocaust ever written, Jakob the Liar is a tale of everyday heroism and the extraordinary power of illusion. Set in an unnamed German-occupied ghetto, the story centers on an unlikely hero, Jakob Heym, who accidentally overhears news of vital importance: the Russians are advancing on a city three hundred miles away... -
![Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott]()
Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsApartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who are forced to share their quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages a drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion. Apartment in Athens depicts a great and terrible war through the lens of everyday existence... -
![When We Meet Again by Caroline Beecham]()
When We Meet Again by Caroline Beecham
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsAn emotionally compelling tale of love and mystery set in the publishing world of World War II London, When We Meet Again tells the story of a mother searching for her stolen child, and illustrates the unbreakable bonds among families, lovers, and readers under the shadow of war... -
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![The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans]()
The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsDuring the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt is visited by Dorbeck. Dorbeck is Osewoudt's spitting image in reverse. Henri is blond and beardless, with a high voice; Dorbeck is dark-haired, and his voice deep.Dorbeck gives Osewoudt a series of dangerous assignments: helping British agents and eliminating traitors. But the assassinations get out of hand.. -
![Day by Elie Wiesel]()
Day by Elie Wiesel
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 24 ratings"Not since Albert Camus has there been such an eloquent spokesman for man." --The New York Times Book ReviewThe publication of Day restores Elie Wiesel's original title to the novel initially published in English as The Accident and clearly establishes it as the powerful conclusion to the author's classic trilogy of Holocaust literature, which includes his memoir Night and novel Dawn... -
![1934: A Novel by Alberto Moravia]()
1934: A Novel by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsMoravia's political fable about an Italian anti-Fascist and the frightened, suicide-seeking German girl he encounters on a boat to Capri--the setting of Moravia's Il disprezzo from 1954--was welcomed as one of his finest novels...Categorized as:
classics politics fiction 20th-century historical historical-fiction psychological book -
![Transit by Anna Seghers]()
Transit by Anna Seghers
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAnna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight... -
![The Train to Warsaw by Gwen Edelman]()
The Train to Warsaw by Gwen Edelman
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsJascha and Lilka separately fled from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. Reunited years later, they live in London where Jascha has become a celebrated writer, feted for his dark tales about his war adventures. One day, forty years after the war, Jascha receives a letter inviting him to give a reading in Warsaw... -
![Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein]()
Revolt in 2100 by Robert A. Heinlein
Rated: 3.74 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsIt wasn't the communists who got us after all...You can read about its beginnings in Heinlein's immortal STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: At the height of America's secular decadence came Nehemiah Scudder, bearing the rod and the wrath of the Lord for those who opposed him, and the promise of earthly happiness and heavenly bliss for those who followed him..Categorized as:
classics politics religion war 20th-century action-adventure alternate-history anthologies -
![Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) by André Malraux]()
Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) by André Malraux
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAs explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to life the profound meaning of the revolutionary impulse for the individuals involved... -
![A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee]()
A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFranklin Hata, Korean by birth but raised in Japan, is an outsider in American society, but he embodies the values of the town he calls his own - he is polite and keeps himself to himself... -
![Indignation by Philip Roth]()
Indignation by Philip Roth
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAgainst the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College... -
![The Assault by Harry Mulisch]()
The Assault by Harry Mulisch
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA novel that probes moral devastation following a Nazi retaliation in a Dutch town. The Assault has been translated and published to great critical acclaim throughout Europe and in the United States.It is the winter of 1945, the last dark days of the ware in occupied Holland. A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides on his bicycle... -
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![Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan]()
Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTristessa is the name with which Kerouac baptized Esperanza Villanueva, a Catholic Mexican young woman, a prostitute and addict to certain drugs, whom he fell in love with during one of his stays in Mexico -a country that he frequently visited - by the middle of the fifties... -
![An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans, David Colmer]()
An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans, David Colmer
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA brooding meditation on violence by a classic post-war Dutch writer who has drawn comparisons to Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.A mesmerizing, dark meditation on the legacy of war. An interloper and opportunist makes a grand house his own in the chaos of a war-torn countryside, only to find himself involved with occupying forces and enraged locals... -
![The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen]()
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Rated: 3.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II.Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay... -
![Caging Skies by Christine Leunens]()
Caging Skies by Christine Leunens
Rated: 3.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA gripping, atmospheric novel about obsession and love. 'Little by little, Elsa leaked out of her enclosure, strayed out into every corner of the house ...In my bed at night, she switched places with me, she enjoying the softness of my bed, and I finding myself cramped up in her airless niche.' This extraordinary novel is seen through the eyes of Johannes...
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