NCW Libraries

"A phenomenal novel of resilience and survival from bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris. In the midst of World War II, an English musician, Norah Chambers, places her eight-year-old daughter Sally on a ship leaving Singapore, desperate to keep her safe from the Japanese army as they move down through the Pacific. Norah remains to care for her husband and elderly parents, knowing she may never see her child again. Sister...

In 1942, Europe remains in the relentless grip of war. Just beyond the tents of the Russian refugee camp she calls home, a young woman speaks her wedding vows. It's a decision that will alter her destiny ... and it's a lie that will remain buried until the next century. Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now fifteen and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border,...

"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six,...

Conventional wisdom explains German defeat during World War II as almost inevitable, primarily for reasons of Allied economic or military brute force created when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 and entered into a two-front war. Why Germany Nearly Won: A New History of the Second World War in Europe challenges this conventional wisdom, highlighting how the re-establishment of the traditional German art of war-updated to accommodate new weapons...

"It is wartime in German-occupied Poland. A mother hides with her five-year-old daughter, a musical prodigy whose slightest sound may cost them their lives. The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. Music helps the flowers bloom. When the daisies grow abundant, the bird weaves a garland for the girl to wear...

In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

As Nazi planes dominated the British sky, 18-year-old Lily Verner made a terrible mistake that she's spent decades trying to forget. But now an unexpected event pulls her back to the 1940s British countryside and her family's textile mill.

"A sweeping, tenderhearted love story, Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash tells the story of two families living through World War II on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and the shy, irresistible young woman who will call them both her own. As German bombs fall over London in 1940, working-class parents Millie and Reginald Thompson make an impossible choice: they decide to send their eleven-year-old daughter, Beatrix, to America. There,...

Fabulously illustrated history relates what daily life was like for ordinary U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen.

"Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. This 'Bomber Mafia' asked:...