A novel that tells the story of a Jewish family in World War II and reaches deep into Jewish history.Born in Brittany on the threshold of World War II, novelist Michèle Sarde had long been silent about her origins. After her mother, Jenny, finally shared their family history, Sarde decided to reconstruct Jenny’s journey, including her exile from Salonica, move to Paris in 1921, and assimilation in France. The Nazi occupation then forced her and her family to hide a...

Jacques Rossi is one of Stalin’s most well-known victims. Author of The Gulag Handbook, a fascinating encyclopedia of the Soviet forced labor camps, Rossi spent twenty years in interrogation, prison, and Gulag detention. Born to a prominent Polish father and French mother, the young Jacques became attracted to communism as a blueprint for radical social reform. He spent years in the communist underground in interwar Europe, agitating for the revolution, but he was arrested during ...

“How can you do this work if you have a child?” asked her mother.“It is because I have a child that I do it,” replied Cecile. “This is not a world I wish her to grow up in.”On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war ha...

From the author of the runaway bestseller A Train in Winter comes the extraordinary story of a French village that helped save thousands, including many Jewish children, who were pursued by the Gestapo during World War II.Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village of scattered houses high in the mountains of the Ardèche. Surrounded by pastures and thick forests of oak and pine, the plateau Vivarais lies in one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of East...

The New York Times–bestselling author explores WWII Paris history and tells the stories of how women survived—or didn't—during the Nazi occupation.Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Par...

A breathtakingly beautiful memoir by a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and an astonishing addition to the library of literature on the HolocaustMarceline Loridan-Ivens was just fifteen when she was arrested along with her father in the Vichy-ruled part of France. Her mother and siblings managed to escape arrest. On their arrival at the camps, the two were separated--her father sent to Auschwitz, she to the neighboring camp of Birkenau. The three kilometres that sepa...

The extraordinary true story of a small group of Frenchwomen, all Resistance members, who banded together in a notorious concentration camp to defy the Nazis—from the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War**“At once heartbreaking and beautifully told, this is a masterwork of nonfiction, a must-read for anyone who wants more of the incredible true story behind Lilac Girls.”—Martha Hall Kelly, author of Lilac ...

A PEOPLE BOOK OF THE WEEKWINNER OF THE JQ–WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE“A haunting tribute to survivors and those lost forever—and a reminder, in our own troubled era, never to forget.” —PeopleAn “exceptional” (The Wall Street Journal) and “poignant” (The New York Times) book in the tradition of rediscovered works like Suite Française and Th...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION • A 2026 Highlight in The Financial Times • Evening Standard • The Bookseller"This is a scintillatingly good book. . . . Thrillingly immersive. . . . I’ve rarely felt such a sense of the historical moment. Or indeed the present moment. Because if ever a book were about now as well as then, it’s this one." —The Sunday TimesThis is the story of how one hotel became a place of escape, ...

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The TODAY Show, Vanity Fair, Financial Times, W Magazine, Oprah Daily, LibraryReadsPraised as “funny and witty” by Kwame Alexander on the TODAY show, now published in the US for the first time, Fearless and Free is the memoir of the “trailblazing” (People), rule-breaking, one-of-a-kind Josephine Baker, the iconic dancer, singer, spy, and Civil Rights activist.“...

"Never Be Afraid: A Belgian Jew in the French Resistance" is the powerful, poignant, at times funny story of Bernard Mednicki, a working-class, activist member of his socialist union in pre-Nazi Belgium who flees with his family to southern France when the Nazis invade, assumes a Christian identity, and, through a series of events, joins the Maquis, the French resistance. Mednicki is a survivor and a fighter, a role model for anyone who has ever faced adversity. For Jews who grew up in the...

"Rosemary Sullivan goes beyond the confines of Air-Bel to tell a fuller story of France during the tense years from 1933 to 1941. . . . A moving tale of great sacrifice in tumultuous times." — Publishers WeeklyParis 1940. Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupery, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the conquering Third Reich, live in daily fear of arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Vi...