Showing titles in 20th Century

Charlie Matters’ life has always been a fight for survival. Orphaned with no prospects, Charlie steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he can enlist in the battle against the Germans. He miraculously emerges unscathed from the Blitz, but there’s no telling when the next bomb will fall, and whether it will be the one to end his life.

Rosa Kusstatscher has built a global fashion empire upon her ability to find the perfect outfit for any occasion. But tonight, as she prepares for the most important meeting of her life, her usual certainty eludes her. What brought her to this moment? As she struggles to select her dress and choose the right shade of lipstick, Rosa begins to tell her incredible story. The story of a poor country girl from a village high in the mountains of Italy. Of Nazi occupation and fleeing in the night. Of hope and heartbreak in Switzerland; ambition, glamour and love in Paris.

Britain stands alone against the forces of Nazi Germany. Livvy Redmond is a young newspaperwoman determined to serve Britain’s spymaster in the face of danger. When she arrives in neutral Lisbon, she discovers a city full of spies, refugees, and the secret police. At an elegant party to meet a double agent, Livvy witnesses him fall to his death from a balcony and must now determine what secrets he wanted to pass her. Further complicating matters, she must guard the man’s young daughter from sinister people trying to kidnap the girl.

It's 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they're too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle - an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood - not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt's German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately.

In Secrets at Bletchley Park by Margaret Dickinson, two young women from very different backgrounds meet in the Second World War and are plunged into a life where security and discretion are paramount. But both have secrets of their own to hide.

The second book in Jeffrey Archer’s highly acclaimed The Clifton Chronicles, The Sins of the Father takes the reader on a breath-taking journey from the backstreets of Bristol to the boardrooms of Manhattan.The book opens in New York, 1939. Harry Clifton, under the new identity of Tom Bradshaw, finds himself arrested for first degree murder.

Based on the harrowing life of Eleonore Hodys, The Mistress of Auschwitz follows the true story of a political prisoner detained in the notorious concentration camp. While experiencing all the horrors of the holocaust, Eleonore turns to friendship for survival. Through companionship with another female prisoner, Eleonore must decide if she has the courage to join the resistance movement which is planning the overthrow of their wicked oppressors.

Sitting bolt upright, Ella rubs at her eyes and concentrates on the music. Is she dreaming? She’d fallen for Luka’s voice the first time she heard him singing on the street corner near her house, with his kind smile and joyous laugh. He was her first love, and the pain of being torn apart still slices at her. He’s alive. But even as hope swells in Ella’s heart, terror threatens to swallow it. Luka is Jewish. If he’s here, he’s in grave danger—even more than Ella faces for sneaking into the ghetto to see him back in Warsaw… But she will never regret it.

THE SIXTH BOOK IN THE MUCH-LOVED DOVER CAFE WWII SAGA SERIES

After the death of their mother, Mollie and Annemarie decide to escape from their tiny Irish village and head to Liverpool to board a ship to New York. But in a cruel twist of fate, the girls are separated when the boat leaves without Mollie.

The isolated Monkshill Park boarding school seems a world away from the violence that has engulfed Europe. Yet its eerie ground have witnessed a murder. Annabel Warnock, a teacher with a checkered past, disappeared during the holidays. The teachers and girls assume she has left the school, but the truth is quite different. Her body is lying at the bottom of the Maiden’s Leap, along the dangerous and overgrown Gothic Walk. Annabel’s ghost is trapped at Monkshill, unable to move on whilst the mystery of hear death remains unsolved.

Spring, 1918. The Great War is at a crucial stage, the Germans are making one last push into France, and the Allies are struggling to hold them back. Battle lines are shifting, and men, and their machines, are being sent up and down the front to shore up defenses. Major Heathcliff Lennox, and his batman Greggs, are told to report to their new HQ. They set off on a sunlit day to fly the distance, but the enemy is never far away, and disaster strikes. They're sent crashing to the ground behind enemy lines, where life, death, and love await.

1941. The Blitz rages over London. And even in Cornwall, the war is being fought. When Violet loses her sister in the Blitz, she must take her nieces to safety in Cornwall. On the coast, she meets carefree chorus girl Eva, who is also running from the dangers of London. But Porthcurno hides a secret military base, and soon Violet and Eva realise there’s a battle to fight in Cornwall, too. Together with local Hazel, who works on the base, they must come together to help the war effort. But will their friendship be enough to keep them safe?

Two weeks before D-day, the French Resistance attacks a chateau containing a telephone exchange vital to German communications - but the building is heavily guarded, and the attack fails disastrously. Flick Clairet, a young British secret agent, proposes a daring new plan: she will parachute into France with an all-woman team known as the Jackdaws, and they will penetrate the chateau in disguise. But, unknown to Flick, Rommel has assigned a brilliant, ruthless intelligence colonel, Dieter Franck, to crush the Resistance. And Dieter is on Flick's trail....

Kate Rees, a young American markswoman, has been recruited by British intelligence to drop into Paris with a dangerous assignment: assassinate the Fuhrer. Wrecked by grief after a Luftwaffe bombing killed her husband and infant daughter, she is armed with a rifle, a vendetta, and a fierce resolve. But other than rushed and rudimentary instruction, she has no formal spy training. Thrust into the red-hot center of the war, a country girl from rural Oregon finds herself holding the fate of the world in her hands.

Back in Folkestone, the residents are dealing with the aftereffects of a devastating air raid. Howard Argent is kept busy at the Bevan while Ulysses Pilchard experiments with electroshock therapy. Meanwhile, women’s suffrage, prostitution and unmarried mothers are hot topics, and Kitty Lumley experiences the sharp end of intolerance.

Jenny Tanner opens the box she has cherished for decades. Contained within are her most precious mementoes, amongst them a pebble, a carving and a newspaper cutting she can hardly bear to read. But Jenny knows the time is finally here. After the war, in a mountainside village in Italy, she left behind a piece of her heart. However painful, she must return to Cinque Alberi. And lay the past to rest.

ARMOR: The Complete Series chronicles the journey of a tank crew through the Second World War, from North Africa to Berlin. Action-packed, authentic, and filled with flawed but tough men of the Greatest Generation, ARMOR drops you straight into the horror, brotherhood, and triumph of armored warfare. You'll fight alongside the crew as they go head-to-head with Tigers at Kasserine Pass, race to Palermo in Sicily, land during the horrific first assault wave at Omaha Beach, crash against the Norman hedgerows, and more.

Scarred—physically and emotionally—by the brutal warfare at Dunkirk, Jack Pembroke decides to leave his home in England to join his father, Admiral Pembroke, in the South African Cape. A fledgling naval force is preparing to fight the coming onslaught of German raiders, and Jack is soon thrust back into action when he is appointed commander of a minesweeping flotilla. Unknown to Jack, a Nazi commerce raider has left Germany for the Cape intending to wreak havoc on Allied shipping.

When George Allenby is put in charge of building a lake in the grounds of an imposing Irish manor house, he intends to do the job as swiftly as possible and return to Belfast. Allenby is still wrestling with his time as an officer during the First World War, burdened by the many things he could have done differently.