Otto, a young man living with his family in a small village situated a few miles from Piotrikow, Poland, is conscripted into Tsar Nicholas IIs army in 1908. From there, events over which he has little control, take him on his lifes journey to St. Petersburg, Russia, through battles in Galicia and eventually to the windswept Saskatchewan prairies. He finds love, experiences adventure, encounters loneliness, undergoes tragedy, and continues to hope for a better life. Cobbled Life is a story ...

"All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque is a powerful and poignant novel that explores the harrowing experiences of soldiers during World War I. First published in 1929, the book is narrated by Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists in the army with his classmates, driven by a sense of patriotism and idealism. However, as the story unfolds, Paul and his friends quickly come to face the brutal realities of war, which shatter their youthful illusions. The novel prov...

William & Rosalie is the gripping and heartfelt account of two young Jewish people from Poland who survive six different German slave and prison camps throughout the Holocaust. In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the me...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceFor eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utt...

IRENE GUT WAS just 17 in 1939, when the Germans and Russians devoured her native Poland. Just a girl, really. But a girl who saw evil and chose to defy it.“No matter how many Holocaust stories one has read, this one is a must, for its impact is so powerful.”—School Library Journal, StarredA Book Sense Top Ten PickA Publisher’s Weekly Choice of the Year’s Best BooksA

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Why did I survive when so many others did not?'Otto was just nine years old when his family was captured in Berlin. All around him, Sinti and Roma families were being torn from their homes and broken up, many of them disappearing altogether.When Otto arrived in Auschwitz, he, as so many others, suffered unimaginable humiliation and suffering, and witnessed horrific violence and dehumanisation of his fe...

PEN/Hemingway Award Winner: A "gorgeous" novel weaving together stories of Poland past and present in one whimsically romantic epic ( Chicago Tribune).On the eve of World War II, in a small Polish village, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon falls in love with a girl fabled for her angelic looks. To build a place in Anielica's heart, he transforms her family's modest hut into a beautiful home. But war arrives, cutting short their courtship and sending the youn...

'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times'An unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' Hilary MantelTwenty years after the end of the war, Horst Krüger attempted to make sense of his childhood. He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believe...

The sequel to the masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back is a classic novel of the slow return of peace to Europe in the years following World War I.After four grueling years, the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicabl...

An unsentimental, fast-paced story of an eleven-year-old fending for himself during the World War II occupation of Holland. Fred describes the Battle of Arnhem raging overhead, near Gestapo misses, living in a chicken coop and an insane asylum, moving between 26 hiding places, and a mad dash across No Man's Land - all to stay out of Nazi hands. Fred's life-like reportage of his wartime memories touches veterans and modern day readers alike.

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated novel of 2014, now a New Directions paperbackWinner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first ch...

In this story of love and loss, Tibor Schroeder, a Christian and reservist in the Hungarian forces allied with Nazi Germany, and Hedy Weisz, a young Jewish woman meet and fall in love during the Second World War - a time when romantic liaisons and marriage between Christians and Jews were not only frowned upon but against the law.Not knowing of the dangers that await them, Tibor and Hedy pledge their lives to each only to be torn apart when Hedy and her family are herded into one N...