This is the story of the first major European city to be liberated by the Allies: what happened to Naples when the scourge of war lashed down upon it, but also, crucially, what happened next. The first major history of wartime Naples to appear in the English language fills a glaring gap in the British […]
Blood Roses by Douglas Jackson
September 1939. A city ruled by fear. A population brutalised by restrictions and reprisals. Amid the devastation, another hunter begins to prowl. What are a few more deaths amid scores of daily executions? Former chief investigator Jan Kalisz lives a dangerous double life, forced to work with the occupiers as he gathers information for the […]
Operation Tulip by Deborah Swift
Holland, 1944: Undercover British agent Nancy Callaghan has been given her toughest case yet. A key member of the Dutch resistance has been captured, and Nancy must play the role of a wealthy Nazi to win over a notorious SS officer, Detlef Keller, and gain crucial information. In England, coding expert Tom Lockwood is devastated […]
Midnight in Vienna by Jane Thynne
As war looms over Britain and there is talk of gas masks and blackout, people are understandably jumpy and anxious. Stella Fry, who’s been working in Vienna for a Jewish family, returns home with no job and a broken heart. She answers an advertisement from a famous mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript […]
Historia Live in Dublin: Sheila O’Flanagan, Jennifer Ryan and Nicola Cassidy
Historia Live in Dublin is back on 2 October, 2024! With Sheila O’Flanagan, Jennifer Ryan and Nicola Cassidy talking about War in Fiction with Hazel Gaynor. Read on to find out more about the authors and how to get your free ticket. Our programme of Historia Live Dublin events continues this autumn with War in […]
The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson
Jersey, 1943. When the German Army invades the tranquil island, librarian Grace La Motée is determined to keep her services running. Ordered to destroy books which threaten the Nazi regime, she refuses, instead hiding them away and fighting back by forming a book club: a lifeline to help islanders escape the terror of war, one […]
Leaving Fatherland by Matt Graydon
Growing up a misfit in Nazi Germany, a victim of his father’s beatings, Oskar finds his love of books is a constant comfort in a world turned upside-down by violence. As a student, as a pilot in the brutal Luftwaffe during the Second World War, in an unhappy marriage to an English bride, he finds […]
Hungary’s vanished village Jews
Jill Culiner investigates why Jews who had survived the Holocaust vanished from a village in Hungary in 1946 and about the centuries of propaganda that led up to a wave of violence in the country. In 2001, while preparing a photographic exhibition about Europe’s vanished Jews, I heard about the pogrom in Kunmadaras, Hungary: in […]