The Second World War is the most popular setting in historical fiction, and it is easy to see why. It reached every continent, it forced ordinary people into impossible choices, and its stories of courage, collaboration, and survival still feel close.
This list picks 23 of the best novels about the war, from Pulitzer and Booker winners to book-club favorites, covering occupied France, the Holocaust, Bletchley Park, the Blitz, the Pacific, and the chaos of 1945. Every entry is a novel, and every summary is spoiler-free.
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Quick Picks
| If you want… | Read |
|---|---|
| The most acclaimed | All the Light We Cannot See |
| A book-club favourite | The Nightingale |
| A German perspective | The Book Thief |
| Spies and code breakers | The Rose Code |
| The Holocaust | Schindler’s List |
| The British home front | Life After Life |
| The Pacific War | The Narrow Road to the Deep North |
| A huge family epic | The Winds of War |
| Something lighter | The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society |
For the wider period, including the best series set in the war, see our WWII historical fiction hub.
The Modern Classics
These are the novels most readers have in mind when they talk about great WWII fiction.
1. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2014)
Setting: France and Germany, 1934 to 1944
Marie-Laure is a blind girl in Paris whose father builds her a model of their neighborhood so she can learn to walk it alone. Werner is a German orphan with a gift for fixing radios, a talent that earns him a place at a brutal Nazi academy.
Doerr moves between them in short, vivid chapters as the war carries both toward the walled Breton town of Saint-Malo. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a Netflix limited series in 2023.
Perfect for readers who love: lyrical prose, alternating viewpoints, and occupied France.
2. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005)
Setting: Molching, a small town near Munich, 1939 to 1943
Liesel Meminger is sent to live with foster parents on Himmel Street, where her gentle foster father teaches her to read. Books become her refuge, and she starts to steal them from a Nazi book-burning to the mayor’s library.
The story is narrated by Death, who is weary, wry, and unexpectedly tender. It shows the war from inside Germany, among ordinary people who choose, at great risk, to shelter a young Jewish man in their basement.
Perfect for readers who love: unusual narrators, coming-of-age stories, and books about books.
3. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (2015)
Setting: Occupied France, 1939 to 1945
Two very different sisters face the German occupation. Vianne, whose husband is taken as a prisoner of war, must share her home with a German officer. Isabelle, younger and reckless, joins the Resistance and helps downed Allied airmen escape over the Pyrenees.
Hannah shows the many forms resistance could take, from dramatic escapes to quiet acts of hiding and feeding. It is one of the best-selling novels of the war and a book-club staple.
Perfect for readers who love: sisters, women in the Resistance and emotional page-turners.
4. Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
Setting: England and France, 1935 and 1940
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees something she does not understand between her older sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son. What she does next changes all three of their lives.
The second half of the novel follows the characters into the war, including the retreat to Dunkirk and the London hospitals of 1940. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and filmed in 2007 with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
Perfect for readers who love: literary fiction, guilt and memory, and Dunkirk.
5. The Winds of War by Herman Wouk (1971)
Setting: Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, 1939 to 1941
US Navy officer Victor “Pug” Henry is posted to Berlin just before the invasion of Poland. His postings, and those of his family, put them close to the great events of the war’s first years, from London in the Blitz to Moscow and Pearl Harbor.
Wouk, a Navy veteran of the war, mixes fiction with real figures such as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler. The story continues in War and Remembrance (1978), and both books became landmark TV miniseries.
Perfect for readers who love: epic scale, political intrigue, and family sagas.
6. Winter of the World by Ken Follett (2012)
Setting: Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, Spain, and the United States, 1933 to 1949
The middle book of Follett’s Century Trilogy follows the children of five families from the rise of Hitler through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the dawn of the atomic age. It can be read on its own, but it works best after Fall of Giants.
Follett’s short chapters and constant cliffhangers make its 900 pages fly. For more of his work, see our Ken Follett guide.
Perfect for readers who love: big sagas with many viewpoints and fast pacing.
The Holocaust
7. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally (1982)
Setting: Kraków and Czechoslovakia, 1939 to 1945
Published in Britain as Schindler’s Ark, Keneally’s novel tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman and Nazi Party member who saved more than a thousand Jews by employing them in his factories. It won the Booker Prize in 1982.
Keneally based the book on interviews with the people Schindler saved, and he presents Schindler as a gambler and opportunist as well as a rescuer. Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film was adapted from it.
Perfect for readers who love: true stories, moral complexity, and stories of rescue.
8. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris (2018)
Setting: Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942 to 1945
Based on the story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovak Jew who was made to tattoo numbers on the arms of fellow prisoners. In the camp, he meets Gita, and he resolves that they will both survive.
It became a global best seller and a 2024 TV series, although historians, including the Auschwitz Memorial, questioned some of its details. Read it as a novel inspired by real people rather than as history.
Perfect for readers who love: stories based on real lives and love in the darkest places.
9. Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay (2007)
Setting: Paris, 1942 and 2002
In July 1942, ten-year-old Sarah is arrested with her parents in the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, when French police detained thousands of Jews in Paris. Before she is taken, she locks her little brother in a hidden cupboard and promises to come back.
Sixty years later, an American journalist in Paris researching the roundup finds that Sarah’s story is closer to her own life than she expected. The novel is as much about how France remembers the war as about the war itself.
Perfect for readers who love: dual timelines and investigative stories.
Spies, Code Breakers and the Resistance
10. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn (2021)
Setting: Bletchley Park, 1940 to 1947
Three very different women, a debutante, a tough East End girl, and a shy local spinster, are recruited to the secret code-breaking center at Bletchley Park. Years later, in the run-up to the 1947 royal wedding, a coded message pulls them back together.
Quinn is one of the most reliable names in women’s wartime fiction. See our Kate Quinn guide for her other novels, including The Diamond Eye, about a Soviet sniper.
Perfect for readers who love: Bletchley Park, female friendship, and puzzles.
11. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (2012)
Setting: Occupied France and England, 1943
A young British agent captured by the Gestapo in France agrees to write down what she knows. Her account is also the story of her friendship with Maddie, the pilot who flew her across the Channel.
It is published as young adult fiction but read by adults everywhere, and it won an Edgar Award. The less you know before starting, the better.
Perfect for readers who love: female friendship, aviation, and clever structures.
12. Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks (1998)
Setting: London and occupied France, 1942 to 1943
Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman in London, is recruited for a mission to occupied France, and she hopes it will also help her find the RAF pilot she has fallen for, who has gone missing over France.
The novel completes Faulks’s loose French trilogy, after Birdsong, and was filmed in 2001 with Cate Blanchett. More in our Sebastian Faulks guide.
Perfect for readers who love: literary fiction, SOE agents, and Vichy France.
13. The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure (2013)
Setting: Occupied Paris, 1942
Lucien Bernard, an ambitious Paris architect, is offered a fortune by a rich industrialist to design hiding places for Jews, spaces so clever that the Gestapo will never find them. He takes the job for the money.
Belfoure, himself an architect, builds a tense thriller around the design of each hiding place and Lucien’s slow change of heart.
Perfect for readers who love: thrillers with a unique premise.
14. The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff (2019)
Setting: New York, London, and France, 1943 to 1946
In 1946, a young widow finds an abandoned suitcase in Grand Central Terminal containing photographs of twelve women. They led her to Eleanor Trigg, who ran a network of British female agents operating in occupied France.
The novel is inspired by the real women of the Special Operations Executive, many of whom never came home.
Perfect for readers who love: SOE history and dual timelines.
The Home Front
15. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013)
Setting: England and Germany, 1910 to 1967, with the Blitz at its heart
Ursula Todd is born on a snowy night in 1910 and dies before she can take her first breath. Then she is born again, and again, each life taking a slightly different path through the century.
Atkinson’s account of the London Blitz, seen through several of Ursula’s lives, is among the most vivid in modern fiction. The novel won the Costa Novel Award, and its companion A God in Ruins follows Ursula’s brother, an RAF bomber pilot.
Perfect for readers who love: inventive structures and the Blitz.
16. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (2008)
Setting: London and Guernsey, 1946
In 1946, London writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a Guernsey farmer who has found her name in a second-hand book. Through letters with the islanders, she learns how their book club began as an alibi during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.
Warm, funny, and moving, it was filmed by Netflix in 2018. Shaffer died before publication, and her niece Annie Barrows completed the book.
Perfect for readers who love: letters, book clubs, and a gentler tone.
17. The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan (2021)
Setting: An English village, 1942
Four women, including a lady of the manor, a widow, a kitchen maid, and a professional chef, compete in a BBC radio cooking contest during rationing. The prize could change their lives.
A comforting read about class, friendship, and making do, with wartime recipes throughout.
Perfect for readers who love: food, female friendship, and the home front.
18. The Postmistress by Sarah Blake (2010)
Setting: Cape Cod and London, 1940 to 1941
An American radio reporter broadcasts from London during the Blitz, while in a small Cape Cod town, the local postmistress and a young doctor’s wife listen. When a letter comes into the postmistress’s hands, she faces a choice about what to deliver.
The novel explores how Americans experienced the war before Pearl Harbor, and the responsibility that comes with telling the news.
Perfect for readers who love: journalists, small towns, and pre-war America.
The Pacific and Beyond
19. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (2013)
Setting: Australia and the Thailand-Burma Railway, 1940s and after
Dorrigo Evans is an Australian surgeon held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where the prisoners are forced to build the Thailand-Burma “Death Railway”. The novel moves among the camp, the love affair that haunts him, and the decades that follow.
Flanagan’s father was a prisoner on the railway. The novel won the Booker Prize in 2014.
Perfect for readers who love: literary fiction and the war in Asia.
20. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka (2002)
Setting: Berkeley, California, and an internment camp in Utah, 1942 to 1945
After Pearl Harbor, a Japanese American mother and her two children are sent from their home in Berkeley to an internment camp in the Utah desert. The father has already been arrested.
Told in short, restrained chapters from each family member’s point of view, it is one of the most powerful novels about the US government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Perfect for readers who love: spare prose and hidden American history.
21. Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys (2016)
Setting: East Prussia and the Baltic Sea, January 1945
As the Red Army advances, four young people flee west toward the coast: a Lithuanian nurse, a Prussian with a secret, a pregnant Polish girl, and a young German sailor. They are heading for the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship meant to carry refugees to safety.
The real sinking of the Gustloff in January 1945 was the deadliest in maritime history, yet it is barely known. The novel won the Carnegie Medal.
Perfect for readers who love: young adult fiction, survival stories, and forgotten history.
The War in Europe: Wider Views
22. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (2010)
Setting: Paris and Hungary, 1937 to 1945
Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish student, wins a scholarship to study architecture in Paris in 1937. He falls in love and builds a life there as Europe slides toward war.
Orringer spends time building Andras’s world, which gives the second half, and the little-told story of Hungary’s Jews, great force.
Perfect for readers who love: long, immersive novels and pre-war Paris.
23. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992)
Setting: A ruined Italian villa, 1945
At the end of the war in Italy, four people share a damaged villa: a badly burned man whose identity is unknown, his Canadian nurse Hana, a thief called Caravaggio, and Kip, a Sikh sapper in the British army.
Ondaatje’s poetic, fragmented novel shared the Booker Prize in 1992, and the 1996 film won nine Oscars.
Perfect for readers who love: literary fiction and poetic prose.
Honourable Mentions
- The Alice Network by Kate Quinn (2017). Mostly set in the First World War, with a 1947 timeline, it follows a fictional agent in the real Alice Network of women spies. See our WWI hub for more.
- Enigma by Robert Harris (1995). A code-breaking thriller at Bletchley Park in 1943. See our Robert Harris guide.
- Bomber by Len Deighton (1970). One RAF bombing raid over Germany, told from both sides. See our Len Deighton guide.
- March Violets by Philip Kerr (1989). The first Bernie Gunther novel, a detective story in 1936 Berlin. See our Philip Kerr guide.
Nonfiction and Wartime Classics
Two books often recommended alongside WWII novels are not historical fiction, but they are worth knowing.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (2010) is a nonfiction account of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who survived weeks adrift in the Pacific and years in Japanese prison camps. It reads like a novel and was filmed in 2014.
Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther (1939) began as newspaper columns about an English family’s life on the eve of war, written at the time rather than looking back. The 1942 film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
WWII Alternate History
Want the war with a different outcome? Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Len Deighton’s SS-GB, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagine a world where the Axis won. See our list of the best alternate history WWII novels.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best WWII historical fiction book?
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is the most acclaimed, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Book Thief, The Nightingale, and Atonement are also widely considered among the best novels about the Second World War.
What are the best WWII novels based on true stories?
Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally, based on interviews with the people Oskar Schindler saved, is the classic example. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the life of Lale Sokolov, and Salt to the Sea is built around the real sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945.
Is Schindler’s List a novel?
Yes. Thomas Keneally wrote it as a novel, first published in Britain as Schindler’s Ark in 1982, when it won the Booker Prize. It is closely based on real events and on interviews with survivors.
What WWII novels focus on women?
The Nightingale, The Rose Code, Code Name Verity, Charlotte Gray, The Lost Girls of Paris and The Kitchen Front all centre on women, whether in the Resistance, at Bletchley Park, in the Special Operations Executive or on the home front.
Are there good WWII novels about the Pacific war?
Yes. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, set on the Thailand-Burma Railway, won the Booker Prize. When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka covers the internment of Japanese Americans.
Are there WWII novels told from a German perspective?
The Book Thief is set among ordinary Germans in a small town near Munich, and All the Light We Cannot See follows a German orphan alongside a French girl. Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels follow a Berlin detective through the Nazi years.
What is an easy WWII novel to start with?
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Kitchen Front are gentle, accessible reads. The Nightingale and The Book Thief are more emotional but very easy to get into.
What WWII novels are good for teenagers?
The Book Thief, Code Name Verity and Salt to the Sea were all published for young adults and are widely read in schools, although they deal honestly with death and violence.