Books like 'Hitler'
Readers who enjoyed Hitler by Ian Kershaw also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century psychological europe western-central-europe austria urban germany war ww2
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Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Robert Chandler
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsLife and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war... -
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings... -
Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsInspired by historical events and by personal history, a shattering, exquisite double portrait of a Norwegian family savaged by World War II and of a man devoted to crimes against humanity, conjoined by an actual house of horrors they both call home... -
Where the Heart Is by Annie Groves
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsA fabulous drama of the Campion family, struggling to stay together as World War Two rages over Liverpool Lou Campion has joined the WAAFs, against the wishes of her parents and twin sister Sasha. Lou's always been a rebel, but now finds that if she wants to succeed she'll have to follow extremely strict rules... -
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The Good Doctor of Warsaw by Elisabeth Gifford
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in the ghettos of wartime Warsaw, this is a sweeping, poignant and heartbreaking tale, based on the true story of one of World War II's quiet heroes - Dr Janusz Korczak.'You do not leave a sick child alone to face the dark and you do not leave a child at a time like this.'Deeply in love and about to marry, students Misha and Sophia flee a Warsaw under Nazi occupation for a chance at freedom... -
Random Harvest by James Hilton
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsCharles Rainier, a prosperous Briton, loses his memory as a result of shellshock in the First World War... -
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... -
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 46 ratingsIn this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality... -
You Let Me Go by Eliza Graham
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA secret family history of love, anguish and betrayal.After her beloved grandmother Rozenn’s death, Morane is heartbroken to learn that her sister is the sole inheritor of the family home in Cornwall—while she herself has been written out of the will... -
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsMoving away from Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared... -
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... -
London Belles by Annie Groves
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsLondon Belles is a tale of four very different young women thrown together by war. Finding freedom and independence – as well as love, passion and heartbreak – for the very first time, a unique bond is formed as the hostilities take their toll on Britain. Four lives. One war that will change them all. When tragedy strikes, Olive is forced to seek lodgers... -
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... -
Mephisto by Klaus Mann
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsKlaus Mann - Thomas Mann’s son - wrote MEPHISTO while living in exile from the Germany of World War II. In it he captures the Isherwood-like atmosphere of Nazi Germany while telling a satiric story about the rise to power of one man - a thinly veiled caricature of his own brother-in-law... -
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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... -
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsRegeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more... -
The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe masterful second novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the GirlsWINNER OF THE 1993 GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE'Spellbinding and startlingly original' Sunday Telegraph'Gripping, moving, profoundly intelligent' Independent on Sunday'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male... -
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
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 . . -
Deadly Communion by Frank Tallis
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsDetective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt finds that young women are being slain in an unnerving—and ingenious—manner, with a small, almost undetectable, hat pin. For Dr. Max Liebermann, the killer is unique in the annals of psychopathology, one who murders in the midst of consensual love...Categorized as:
europe western-central-europe austria urban mystery historical-fiction fiction historical -
In Parenthesis by David Jones, W.S. Merwin
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratings"This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, and was part of": with quiet modesty, David Jones begins a work that is among the most powerful imaginative efforts to grapple with the carnage of the First World War, a book celebrated by W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the masterpieces of modern literature... -
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... -
The Lines We Leave Behind by Eliza Graham
Rated: 3.95 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsEngland, 1947: A young woman finds herself under close observation in an insane asylum, charged with a violent crime she has no memory of committing. As she tries to make sense of her recent past, she recalls very little.But she still remembers wartime in Yugoslavia... -
Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn this magnificent work of fiction, William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century... -
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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... -
The Children of Freedom by Marc Levy
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA remarkable story of struggle and survival in World War II by France's No. 1 bestselling novelist Early in 1942, two young brothers join a Resistance group. All the members of the group are young, most of their families came from elsewhere in Europe or North Africa and all of them are passionately committed to the freedom of France and Europe... -
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
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
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... -
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAusterlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable” (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle... -
The Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsOne of the arrivals, a young man pleasantly distinguished by his good dress and elastic walk, hurried ahead of the others and entered one of the hotel 'buses. The horses took the steep road leisurely. Spring was in the air... -
She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir
Rated: 3.89 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsWritten in 1943, this book was written as an act of revenge against the woman who nearly destroyed the author's life with the celebrated philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre... -
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... -
A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsOne morning, in the dead of winter, three German soldiers are dispatched into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders to track down and bring back for execution 'one of them' - a Jew. Having flushed out the young man hiding in the woods, they decide to rest in an abandoned house before continuing their journey back to the camp... -
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Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum’s celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell...Categorized as:
europe western-central-europe germany urban fiction classics historical-fiction literary-fiction -
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... -
Block 11 by Piero Degli Antoni
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsFrom an award-winning author comes an audacious, high-concept noir set in Auschwitz that straddles past and present New York, the An old woman and her husband sit down for a breakfast of black bread and coffee at a table set for ten. Eight chairs remain empty. Auschwitz, Spring 1944: Following a successful escape from the camp, a group of ten prisoners are rounded up for execution... -
The Twilight World by Werner Herzog
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War IIIn 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda... -
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson
Rated: 3.81 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a novel about the American search for purpose in a world dominated by business. Tom and Betsy Rath share a struggle to find contentment in their hectic and material culture while several other characters fight essentially the same battle, but struggle in it for different reasons. In the end, it is a story of taking responsibility for one's own life... -
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
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... -
Transgression: A Novel of Love and War by James W. Nichol
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsHow can love survive a brutal time? In 1946 in North America, a child makes a grisly find in a deserted field—a discovery that opens a shuttered window on a secret dating back to the beginning of the turbulent decade... -
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... -
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life... -
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The Metal Heart: A Novel of Love and Valor in World War II by Caroline Lea
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 12 ratings“The story of true innocents caught up in the machinery of war. Exquisitely researched, beautifully told, this tiny corner of Scotland came alive for me in all of my senses and I found myself rooting for the central characters with all my heart... -
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Rated: 3.80 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature.Franz Biberkopf, pimp and petty thief, has just finished serving a term in prison for murdering his girlfriend... -
Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter R. Pouncey
Rated: 3.70 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA brief, lyrical novel with a powerful emotional charge, Rules for Old Men Waiting is about three wars of the twentieth century and an ever-deepening marriage. In a house on the Cape “older than the Republic,” Robert MacIver, a historian who long ago played rugby for Scotland, creates a list of rules by which to live out his last days... -
Journey into the Past by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA deep study of the uneasy heart by one of the masters of the psychological novel, Journey into the Past, published here for the first time in America, is a novella that was found among Zweig’s papers after his death... -
Will by Jeroen Olyslaegers
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA tense, thrilling, morally murky read, set in Nazi-occupied Antwerp and inspired by the author's own family history of collaboration during WW2 It is 1941, and Antwerp is in the grip of Nazi occupation. Wilfried Wils, novice policeman and frustrated writer, has no intention of being a hero. He just wants to keep his head down; to pretend the fear and violence around him aren't happening... -
A Death in Vienna by Frank Tallis
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, Max Liebermann is at the forefront of psychoanalysis, practicing the controversial new science with all the skill of a master detective. Every dream, inflection, or slip of tongue in his “hysterical” patients has meaning and reveals some hidden truth...
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