Books like 'Jakob the Liar'
Readers who enjoyed Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century psychological military, war & conflict europe western-central-europe poland historical-fiction ww2 classics
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Spark of Life: A Novel of Resistance by Erich Maria Remarque
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSPARK OF LIFE509 is a political prisoner in a German concentration camp. For ten years, he has persevered in the most hellish conditions. Deathly weak, he still has his wits about him and he senses that the end of the war is near. If he and the other living corpses in his barracks can hold on for liberation--or force their own--then their suffering will not have been in vain... -
![Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Robert Chandler]()
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...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![The Orphans of Berlin by Jina Bacarr]()
The Orphans of Berlin by Jina Bacarr
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA heartbreaking World War 2 novel that tells the story of two women’s fight for love, family and hope, as the world crumbles around them. Based on the true story of the Kindertransport rescue from Nazi-occupied Europe.Berlin, 1936. The Landau family are at the heart of their community, running a music shop in Berlin and just trying to survive... -
![Death Is My Trade by Robert Merle]()
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... -
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![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...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university war ww2 20th-century action-adventure -
![Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett]()
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsOne enemy spy knows the secret to the Allies' greatest deception, a brilliant aristocrat and ruthless assassin -- code name: "The Needle" -- who holds the key to ultimate Nazi victory. Only one person stands in his way: a lonely Englishwoman on an isolated island, who is beginning to love the killer who has mysteriously entered her life... -
![The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk]()
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsUpon its original publication in 1951, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was immediately embraced as one of the first serious works of fiction to help readers grapple with the human consequences of World War II...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, Geoff Wilkes]()
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, Geoff Wilkes
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsInspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![Sophie's Choice by William Styron]()
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsIn this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There, he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure audiobook -
![Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]()
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 62 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal... -
![Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]()
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsCancer Ward - a largely autobiographical account of a group of people who pass through the cancer wing of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death - was hailed by Time as 'a literary event of the first magnitude' when it first appeared in 1966... -
![Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig]()
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...Categorized as:
classics europe historical-fiction literary-fiction war western-central-europe 20th-century adult -
![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... -
![Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger]()
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... -
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![The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro]()
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsAn alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here.The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university war ww2 20th-century action-adventure -
![The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]()
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:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![HIDDEN by Linda Gillard]()
HIDDEN by Linda Gillard
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA birth. A death. Hidden for a hundred years. The new novel from the author of Kindle bestseller THE MEMORY TREE “Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the war...Categorized as:
historical-fiction war literary-fiction historical 20th-century suspense family fiction -
![Where the Heart Is by Annie Groves]()
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... -
![The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna]()
The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsRecommended reading as part of the Chief of Naval Operation's Professional Reading Program!This now-classic novel by Richard McKenna enjoyed great critical acclaim and commercial success when it was first published in 1962...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war 20th-century action-adventure adult asia -
![The Good Doctor of Warsaw by Elisabeth Gifford]()
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... -
![Brodeck by Philippe Claudel]()
Brodeck by Philippe Claudel
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSet in an unnamed time and place, Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar, myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century 21st-century adult -
![Qb VII by Leon Uris]()
Qb VII by Leon Uris
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsIn Queen’s Bench Courtroom Number Seven, famous author Abraham Cady stands trial. In his book The Holocaust—born of the terrible revelation that the Jadwiga Concentration Camp was the site of his family’s extermination—Cady shook the consciousness of the human race. He also named eminent surgeon Sir Adam Kelno as one of Jadwiga’s most sadistic inmate/doctors...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![Random Harvest by James Hilton]()
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...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson]()
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAs two pals wander the streets of Belfast in search of something better--a better pint, a better job, a better woman, a better now--readers are treated to their hilarious misadventures, political intrigues, and outlandish schemes...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university war 20th-century action-adventure adult -
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![The Seven Year Dress by Paulette Mahurin]()
The Seven Year Dress by Paulette Mahurin
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of the darkest times in human history was the insane design and execution to rid the world of Jews and “undesirables.” At the hands of the powerful evil madman Adolf Hitler, families were ripped apart and millions were slaughtered. Persecution, torture, devastation, and enduring the unthinkable remained for those who lived. This is the story of one woman who lived to tell her story... -
![All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir]()
All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsWhen the beautiful, ambitious actress Regina takes Fosca into her life and learns his amazing truth, she is obsessed with the thought that in his memory her performances will live forever... -
![Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton]()
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsHamilton captures the edgy, obsessive and eventually murderous mindset of a romantically frustrated British man in this WWII-era novel. London 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation with Netta who is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George... -
![A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr]()
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsIn J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church... -
![The Door by Magda Szabó, أسماء المطيري]()
The Door by Magda Szabó, أسماء المطيري
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA busy young writer struggling to cope with domestic chores, hires a housekeeper recommended by a friend. The housekeeper's reputation is one built on dependable efficiency, though she is something of an oddity. Stubborn, foul-mouthed and with a flagrant disregard for her employer's opinions she may even be crazy...Categorized as:
classics europe historical-fiction literary-fiction war western-central-europe ww2 20th-century -
![The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann]()
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...Categorized as:
classics europe historical-fiction literary-fiction war western-central-europe 20th-century adult -
![You Let Me Go by Eliza Graham]()
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...Categorized as:
europe historical-fiction war ww2 literary-fiction british-isles united-kingdom england -
![Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey]()
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...Categorized as:
historical-fiction war literary-fiction ww2 fiction historical audiobook female-author -
![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... -
![Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram]()
Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThis is a novel by the author of Hold Tight... -
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![Song of the Exile by Kiana Davenport]()
Song of the Exile by Kiana Davenport
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsIn this epic, original novel in which Hawaii's fierce, sweeping past springs to life, Kiana Davenport, author of the acclaimed Shark Dialogues, draws upon the remarkable stories of her people to create a timeless, passionate tale of love and survival, tragedy and triumph, survival and transcendence...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![The Wedding Tree by Robin Wells]()
The Wedding Tree by Robin Wells
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsNational bestselling author Robin Wells weaves a moving epic that stretches from modern-day Louisiana to World War II-era New Orleans and back again in this multigenerational tale of love, loss and redemption. Hope Stevens thinks Wedding Tree, Louisiana, will be the perfect place to sort out her life and all the mistakes she’s made... -
![The Glass Château by Stephen P. Kiernan]()
The Glass Château by Stephen P. Kiernan
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFrom the critically acclaimed author of Universe of Two and The Baker’s Secret, a novel of hope, healing, and the redemptive power of art, set against the turmoil of post-World War II France and inspired by the life of Marc Chagall.One month after the end of World War II, amid the jubilation in the streets of France, there are throngs of people stunned by the recovery work ahead... -
![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... -
![The Missing Daughter by Emily Gunnis]()
The Missing Daughter by Emily Gunnis
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom the author of the runaway bestseller The Girl in the Letter comes a heartwrenching, twisting novel of betrayal, tragedy and a shocking family secret buried for decades.1960. Thirteen-year-old Rebecca lives in fear of her father’s temper. As a storm batters Seaview Cottage one night, she hears a visitor at the door and a violent argument ensues... -
![The Charioteer by Mary Renault]()
The Charioteer by Mary Renault
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAfter enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans’ hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig]()
The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![Mephisto by Klaus Mann]()
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...Categorized as:
classics europe historical-fiction literary-fiction war western-central-europe ww2 20th-century -
![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...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university war ww2 20th-century action-adventure -
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![The Ghost Road by Pat Barker]()
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAn alternate cover edition can be found here.As World War I winds to a close, two men--Dr. William Rivers, a psychologist whose dedicated healing sends men back to the brutal front, and Billy Prior, a shell-shocked soldier determined to rejoin the final English offensive--are profounded affected by the events of the era. Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university war 20th-century adult audiobook -
![Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler]()
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsDarkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university war ww2 20th-century action-adventure -
![Regeneration by Pat Barker]()
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...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction university war 20th-century adult audiobook -
![The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker]()
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... -
![Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu]()
Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsDuring the First World War, just behind the eastern front, there was a forest, where Austrians and Hungarians used to hang deserters. To this place came Apostol Bologa, a young Romanian officer eager to serve his country. Born in a Romanian region of Transylvania which was then under Hungarian rule, he had naturally enough joined the Austro-Hungarian army... -
![Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok]()
Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFor Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and '40s is an experience of joy and sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction war ww2 20th-century bildungsroman book
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