Books like 'They Were Counted'
Readers who enjoyed They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy & Patrick Leigh Fermor also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century military, war & conflict action / adventure historical-fiction classics literary-fiction politics war journey
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Sodan mainingit by Herman Wouk
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThese two classic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold the compelling tale of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.The multimillion-copy bestsellers that capture all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War -- and that constitute Wouk's crowning achievement -- are available for the first time in trade paperback...Categorized as:
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My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsCentered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, My Tender Matador is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades. It is spring 1986 in the city of Santiago, and Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power...Categorized as:
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Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsIt is 1939. Despite a law banning him from performing surgery, Ravic – a German doctor and refugee living in Paris – has been treating some of the city’s most elite citizens for two years on the behalf of two less-than-skillful French physicians...Categorized as:
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Forest of the Gods by Balys Sruoga
Rated: 4.44 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsBalys Sruoga was a well-known Lithuanian poet, dramatist, and literary critic. In 1943, professor of Vilnius University, he was deported to Stutthof concentration camp (along with other professors, under the charge of campaigning students against joining the Reich troops)... -
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To Live by Yu Hua, 余华
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom the author of Brothers and China in Ten Words this celebrated contemporary classic of Chinese literature was also adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. This searing novel, originally banned in China but later named one of that nation's most influential books, portrays one man's transformation from the spoiled son of a landlord to a kindhearted peasant...Categorized as:
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Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAn aspiring photographer follows her dreams and faces her fears in a poignant novel about finding beauty, promise, and love amid the chaos of war-torn Kurdistan.It’s 1979. Olivia Murray, a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, is determined to become a photojournalist and make a difference with her work...Categorized as:
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The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsHaunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million people...Categorized as:
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Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAlamut takes place in 11th Century Persia, in the fortress of Alamut, where self-proclaimed prophet Hasan ibn Sabbah is setting up his mad but brilliant plan to rule the region with a handful elite fighters who are to become his "living daggers...Categorized as:
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The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I, The Bridge on the Drina earned Ivo Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Andric's stunning novel...Categorized as:
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Trinity by Leon Uris
Rated: 4.27 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsLeon Uris’s beloved Irish classic, available in Avon mass market. From the acclaimed author who enthralled the world with Exodus, Battle Cry, QB VII, Topaz, and other beloved classics of twentieth-century fiction comes a sweeping and powerful epic adventure that captures the "terrible beauty" of Ireland during its long and bloody struggle for freedom...Categorized as:
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Mila 18 by Leon Uris
Rated: 4.27 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsIt was a time of crisis, a time of tragedy and a time of transcendent courage and determination. Leon Uris's novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists...Categorized as:
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The Last Restaurant in Paris by Lily Graham
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsParis 1944. To save her people, she served the enemy.In enemy-occupied Paris, as the locals go to bed starving and defeated by the war, music and laughter spills through the door of a little restaurant, crowded with German soldiers. The owner Marianne moves on weary feet between its packed tables, carrying plates of steaming, wholesome food for the enemy officers...Categorized as:
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The Children's Train by Jana Zinser
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThis compelling Holocaust action adventure story tells of bravery, sacrifice, and the survival of the human spirit against Hitler and the horrors of war."Gripping and impossible to put down. I cried several times throughout. Perfect ending, emotional but complete...Categorized as:
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House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWith House Of Glass comes the final chapter of Pramoedya's epic quartet, set in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the century. A novel of heroism, passion, and betrayal, it provides a spectacular conclusion to a series hailed as one of the great works of modern literature...Categorized as:
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Flying Colours by C.S. Forester
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsForced to surrender his ship, the Sutherland, after a long and bloody battle, Captain Horatio Hornblower now bides his time as a prisoner in a French fortress...Categorized as:
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Taiko by Eiji Yoshikawa
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratings"In the tempestuous closing decades of the sixteenth century, the Empire of Japan writhes in chaos as the shogunate crumbles and rival warlords battle for supremacy. Warrior monks in their armed citadels block the road to the capital; castles are destroyed, villages plundered, fields put to the touch." "Amid this devastation, three men dream of uniting the nation...Categorized as:
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The Loving Cup by Winston Graham
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSet in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, this novel is part of the Poldark saga. At the heart of the novel stand Demelza and Ross Poldark, their son, Jeremy, their daughter, Clowance, and the rival family, the Warleggans...Categorized as:
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Sharpe's Waterloo by Bernard Cornwell
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsJune 1815: The Duke of Wellington, the Prince of Orange, and Napoleon will meet on the battlefield...and decide the fate of EuropeWith the emperor Napoleon at its head, and enormous French army is marching toward Brussels. The British and their allies are also converging on Brussels - in preparation for a grand society ball...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction politics war 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis stirring, poignant novel, based on real historical events that made of actual people true heroes, unfolds the tragedy that befell the Armenian people in the dark year of 1915. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands southwest of the Caspian Sea the Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects...Categorized as:
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S.: A Novel about the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulić
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in 1992, during the height of the Bosnian war, S. reveals one of the most horrifying aspects of any war: the rape and torture of civilian women by occupying forces. S. is the story of a Bosnian woman in exile who has just given birth to an unwanted child—one without a country, a name, a father, or a language...Categorized as:
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I Saw Her That Night by Drago Jančar
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsI Saw Her That Night, a love story in time of war, is a novel about a few years in the life and mysterious disappearance of Veronika Zarnik, a young bourgeois woman from Ljubljana, sucked into the whirlwind of a turbulent period in history... -
If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPrimo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he reveals the extraordinary lives of the Russian, Polish and Jewish partisans trapped behind enemy lines during the Second World War...Categorized as:
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The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsNotice: "In the First Circle" and "The First Circle": "In The First Circle" is 200pp longer; "The first circle" is a censored and abridged version.Set in Moscow during a three-day period in December 1949, 'The First Circle' is the story of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician...Categorized as:
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Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIt is autumn, 1941, and a German U-boat commander and his crew set out on yet another hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over the coming weeks they must brave the stormy waters of the Atlantic in their mission to seek out and destroy British supply ships. But the tide is beginning to turn against the Germans in the war for the North Atlantic...Categorized as:
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The Kites by Romain Gary
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOn a small farm in Normandy, as Hitler rises to power in Germany, young Ludo comes of age in the care of his Uncle Ambrose, an eccentric mailman, kite-maker, and pacifist. Ludo’s quiet existence changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family who own the estate next door. In a single glance, Ludo instantly falls in love forever; Lila, on the other hand, remains elusive...Categorized as:
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The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe War of the End of the World is one of the great modern historical novels. Inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the unforgettable story of an apocalyptic movement, led by a mysterious prophet, in which prostitutes, beggars and bandits establish Canudos, a new republic, a libertarian paradise...Categorized as:
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A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsNevil Shute's most beloved novel, a tale of love and war, follows its enterprising heroine from the Malayan jungle during World War II to the rugged Australian outback.Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children...Categorized as:
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Pereira Declares: A Testimony by Antonio Tabucchi
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsDr. Pereira is an aging, overweightjournalist who has failed to noticethe menacing cloud of fascism overSalazarist Portugal, until one day hemeets an aspiring young writer andanti-fascist. Breaking out of his apolitical torpor, Pereira reluctantly rises to heroism...Categorized as:
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Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories by Ghassan Kanafani
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThis collection of important stories by novelist, journalist, teacher, and Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani includes the stunning novella Men in the Sun (1962), the basis of the The Deceived. Also in the volume are "The Land of Sad Oranges" (1958), "'If You Were a Horse..Categorized as:
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The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThis is Jean Larteguy's most famous book that garnered international acclaim and sold millions of copies. It was also the basis for the movie, The Lost Command, starring Anthony Quinn. In his autobiography, Larteguy writes that he got the name of the book from when he was traveling with the Foreign Legion in the Sahara and came across an old Roman column at an oasis...Categorized as:
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A Bitter Rain by James D. Shipman
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA former professor descends into darkness in this provocative story of a Nazi soldier torn between duty and conscience. East Prussia, Nazi Germany, 1939. History professor Erik Mueller is a model citizen and a family man. He’s also a decorated sergeant in the Gestapo... -
Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić, Joseph Hitrec
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in the town of Travnik, Bosnian Chronicle presents the struggle for supremacy in a region that stubbornly refuses to submit to any outsider. The era is Napoleanic and the novel, both in its historical scope and psychological subtley, Tolstoyan. In its portray of conflict and fierce ethnic loyalties, the story is also eerily relevant...Categorized as:
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The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 15 ratingsThe Living Reed follows four generations of one family, the Kims, beginning with Il-han and his father, both advisors to the royal family in Korea. When Japan invades and the queen is killed, Il-han takes his family into hiding. In the ensuing years, he and his family take part in the secret war against the Japanese occupation. Pearl S... -
The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe Young Lions is a vivid and classic novel that portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting World War II. Told from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life, Shaw conveys, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war...Categorized as:
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The Last Checkmate by Gabriella Saab
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsReaders of Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz and watchers of The Queen’s Gambit won’t want to miss this amazing debut set during World War II. A young Polish resistance worker, imprisoned in Auschwitz as a political prisoner, plays chess in exchange for her life, and in doing so fights to bring the man who destroyed her family to justice...Categorized as:
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What the Day Owes the Night by Yasmina Khadra
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratings'If a woman loves you, Younes, if she truly loves you, and if you have the wisdom to appreciate this great privilege, then there is no god to touch you.'As a young man Younes' life is irrevocably changed when he leaves his broken home for the vibrant, colourful and affluent European district of Río Salado...Categorized as:
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Fields of Fire by James Webb
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOriginally published in 1978, Webb's classic novel of the Vietnam War follows three soldiers from different worlds who are plunged into a white-hot murderous realm of jungle warfare as it was fought by one Marine platoon in the An Hoa Basin in 1969.'They each had their reasons for being a soldier. They each had their illusions. Goodrich came from Harvard...Categorized as:
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The Miller's Dance by Winston Graham
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsCornwall 1812. At Nampara, the Poldark family finds the new year brings involvement in more than one unexpected venture. For Ross and Demelza there is some surprising - and worrying - news. And Clowance, newly returned from her London triumphs, finds that her entanglement with Stephen Carrington brings not only happiness but heartache...Categorized as:
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China by Edward Rutherfurd
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe internationally bestselling author of Paris and New York takes on an exhilarating new world with his trademark epic style in China: The Novel Edward Rutherfurd has enthralled millions of readers with his grand, sweeping historical sagas that tell the history of a famous place over multiple generations...Categorized as:
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The Commodore by C.S. Forester
Rated: 4.16 of 5 stars · 19 ratings1812 and the fate of Europe lies in the hands of newly appointed Commodore Hornblower. Dispatched to northern waters, Hornblower will protect Britain's Baltic interests and halt the advance of Napoleon's empire into Sweden and Russia...Categorized as:
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The Secret Vow by Natalie Meg Evans
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsKatya – young, beautiful and impoverished – arrives in Paris, hoping to begin a new life. She leaves behind a terrible secret, and her survival in this strange and beautiful new city depends on nobody ever discovering who – and what – she is...Categorized as:
historical-fiction war literary-fiction romance 20th-century historical fiction military -
The 13th Valley by John M. Del Vecchio
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPraise for "The 13th Valley," a Finalist for the American Book Award: "There have been a number of excellent books about Vietnam...but none has managed to communicate in such detail the day-to-day pain, discomfort, frustration and exhilaration of the American military experience in Vietnam." --Joe Klein, "The New York Times Book Review"" "The" novel about the Vietnam War.. -
Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMiljenko Jergovic’s remarkable début collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro – winner of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize – earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. Croatian by birth, Jergovic ? spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war...Categorized as:
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Springtime in a Broken Mirror by Mario Benedetti
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn the tradition of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, a celebrated classic and heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart by the forces of history, by one of Latin America’s most celebrated writersSpringtime in a Broken Mirror revolves around Santiago, a political prisoner in Uruguay, who was jailed after a brutal military coup that saw many of his comrades flee elsewhere...Categorized as:
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The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. by Sandra Gulland
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsYoung Josephine Bonaparte shines at the center of a new, sweeping, romantic work of historical fiction by Sandra Gulland: detailed and exhaustively researched, compelling and powerful, The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. is the first in a trilogy of fictional novels tracing the actual rise of a young European noblewoman who would one day stand next to Napoleon...Categorized as:
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The Girl They Left Behind by Roxanne Veletzos, Cassandra Campbell
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA sweeping family saga and love story that offers a vivid and unique portrayal of life in war-torn 1941 Bucharest and life behind the Iron Curtain during the Soviet Union occupation—perfect for fans of Lilac Girls and Sarah’s Key.On a freezing night in January 1941, a little Jewish girl is found on the steps of an apartment building in Bucharest...Categorized as:
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Sharpe's Gold by Bernard Cornwell
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsWith Wellington outnumbered, the bankrupt army's only hope of avoiding, collapse is a hidden cache of Portuguese gold. Only Captain Richard Sharpe is capable of stealing it—and it means turning against his own men...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction war 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book -
The End of the Hunt by Thomas Flanagan
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsSet in Ireland at the time of the Troubles, during the watershed year of 1919, Thomas Flanagan's epic The End of the Hunt chronicles the years following World War I, in which the British attempted to put down once and for all the centuries-old dream of an independent Ireland...Categorized as:
historical-fiction journey literary-fiction war 20th-century action-adventure adult anthologies -
Ærens vej by Humphrey Cobb
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe anti-war masterpiece that became an iconic motion picture-now with a foreword by the creator of the acclaimed HBO(tm) series The Wire Familiar to many as the Stanley Kubrick film starring Kirk Douglas, Paths of Glory explores the perilous complications involved in what nations demand of their soldiers in wartime...Categorized as:
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Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis astonishingly proficient and gripping first novel should be required reading for anyone who calls him or herself a responsible citizen. Not only is it masterfully written, with images as sharp as shards of broken glass, but it also carries a message so potent it burns into the conscience...Categorized as:
historical-fiction journey literary-fiction politics war 20th-century action-adventure adult
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