Lives in Wartime: Award-Winning Novels and Histories of World War II

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Carnegie Medal, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Marie-Laure, a blind girl in occupied France, and Werner, a German orphan with a gift for fixing radios, grow up on opposite sides of the war. Told in short, luminous chapters, Anthony Doerr's novel is about the power of technology, the choices people make under pressure and the small kindnesses that survive the worst of times.

Perfect for: Anyone starting here - it's the most accessible novel on the list.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Booker. On a hot summer day in 1935, what thirteen-year-old Briony sees - and what she says about it - changes three lives forever and carries them into the war. Ian McEwan's novel is about love, class, guilt and whether a wrong can ever be put right.

Perfect for: Readers who love a beautifully written, emotionally gripping story they'll keep thinking about.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Joe Kavalier, a young escape artist and magician, flees Prague and arrives on the Brooklyn doorstep of his cousin Sammy Clay. While Hitler's shadow falls across Europe, the two invent a comic-book hero who fights fascists on the page. Michael Chabon's big, warm, funny novel is about ambition, friendship and the stories we tell to fight back against the dark.

Perfect for: Comic fans, New York lovers, and readers who want a war novel full of joy as well as grief.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Booker Prize. At the end of the war, four people shelter in a ruined villa in Italy: Hana, a young nurse; Caravaggio, a thief with maimed hands; Kip, an Indian sapper who defuses bombs; and the English patient - nameless and terribly burned, a riddle to everyone around him. Michael Ondaatje's novel is a lyrical, haunting story of memory, love and identity.

Perfect for: Readers who love poetic prose and stories that reveal themselves slowly.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. In 1943, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans struggles to keep the men under his command alive in a brutal Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway - while haunted by a love affair from two years before. Richard Flanagan's savagely beautiful novel is about good and evil, memory and what war does to a life.

Perfect for: Readers ready for an intense, unforgettable book about the war in the Pacific.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Based on the testimony of the people he saved, Thomas Keneally tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German war profiteer and factory owner who, amid unspeakable evil, set out to protect his Jewish workers. A milestone of Holocaust literature - and the book behind Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.

Perfect for: Readers who know the film and want the fuller story behind it.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Award. In a cheap Brooklyn rooming house after the war, Stingo, a young would-be writer, is drawn into the lives of the couple upstairs: Nathan, a brilliant and volatile Jewish intellectual, and Sophie, a Polish Catholic who survived a concentration camp. William Styron's novel is one of the most powerful books about the long shadow the Holocaust cast over the survivors.

Perfect for: Readers who want a big, demanding classic of American fiction.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and raised by foster parents who erase every trace of who he was. Decades later, now an architectural historian, he finds the past he has avoided all his life returning to him. W.G. Sebald's hypnotic novel, with its photographs and long, winding sentences, is unlike anything else on this list.

Perfect for: Readers who like quiet, unusual literary fiction about memory and identity.

Why it’s here: A special Pulitzer Prize went to Maus, often called the greatest graphic novel ever written. Art Spiegelman retells his father's experiences during the Holocaust - with Jews drawn as mice and Nazis as cats - alongside his own difficult relationship with his aging father. A bridge between the novels and the history on this list, and a book that changed what comics could do.

Perfect for: Teenagers and adults who have never tried a graphic book - and everyone who has.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Mildred Harnack, an American living in Berlin, watched the Nazis rise to power - and began holding secret meetings in her apartment to help Jews escape and resist Hitler. When the war began, she spied for the Allies. Her great-great-niece Rebecca Donner tells her story like a political thriller, rescuing a remarkable woman history nearly forgot.

Perfect for: Readers who like true stories of resistance and courage told with novelistic pace.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize. Starting from the city of Lviv, lawyer Philippe Sands traces the two men who invented the legal ideas of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" in response to the Nazis' atrocities - and, in parallel, the hidden story of his own grandfather's path through wartime Europe. Part legal history, part family detective story.

Perfect for: Readers who love history with a personal mystery at its heart.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and an international bestseller. Timothy Snyder tells the history of the lands between Germany and Russia, where Hitler's and Stalin's regimes together killed some fourteen million people outside of battle. It looks at the war from where it was deadliest - and changes how you understand Europe's twentieth century.

Perfect for: Readers ready for a serious, eye-opening history of Eastern Europe.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize (today the Baillie Gifford Prize) and the Wolfson History Prize. Antony Beevor's account of the battle that became the focus of Hitler's and Stalin's determination - and of the soldiers and civilians who endured it. Vivid, gripping and humane, it helped turn military history into bestseller reading.

Perfect for: Military history readers and anyone who wants to understand the turning point of the war.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Ernie Pyle was the most beloved war correspondent of his time: through his columns, millions of Americans understood what their soldiers were living through. James Tobin tells the story of an anxious, unlikely hero who walked with the infantry and wrote about the war from the ground.

Perfect for: Readers interested in journalism and the ordinary soldier's war.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize - the most awarded book on this list. John W. Dower tells the story of Japan in the shattering aftermath of the war and the six years of American occupation, from the fate of the Emperor to the hopes and fears of ordinary people. A fitting end to the list: what came after.

Perfect for: Readers who want to see how a country rebuilt itself after total defeat.