The sacrifices made by our veterans extend far beyond the battlefield—they echo through families, communities, and generations. These books offer readers a window into the courage, resilience, and profound costs of military service. From gripping firsthand accounts to meticulously researched historical narratives, this list of titles released in the past year invites us to better understand the men and women who have worn the uniform. They remind us that behind every medal and monument are individual stories of sacrifice, camaraderie, and the ongoing challenges many veterans face long after coming home.
As we seek to honour those who have served, these pages offer one of the most meaningful ways we can express our gratitude: by listening to their stories, learning from their experiences, and ensuring their sacrifices are neither forgotten nor diminished.
Last Twilight in Paris by Pam Jenoff
A Parisian department store, a mysterious necklace and a woman’s quest to unlock a decade-old mystery are at the center of this riveting novel of love and survival, from New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff
London, 1953. Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she discovers a necklace in a box at a secondhand shop. The box is marked with the name of a department store in Paris, and she is certain she has seen the necklace before when she worked with the Red Cross in Nazi-occupied Europe —and that it holds the key to the mysterious death of her friend Franny during the war.
Following the trail of clues to Paris, Louise seeks help from her former boss Ian, with whom she shares a romantic history. The necklace leads them to discover the dark history of Lévitan—a once-glamorous department store that served as a Nazi prison, and Helaine, a woman who was imprisoned there, torn apart from her husband when the Germans invaded France.
Louise races to find the connection between the necklace, the department store and Franny’s death. But nothing is as it seems, and there are forces determined to keep the truth buried forever. Inspired by the true story of Lévitan, Last Twilight in Paris is both a gripping mystery and an unforgettable story about sacrifice, resistance and the power of love to transcend in even the darkest hours.
Angels of War By Lana Kortchik
The Philippines, 1941. Rose Williams arrives in Manila on her first assignment as a US Army nurse, enthralled by the new environment and its promise of adventure. Although worlds away from the land she grew up in, Rose feels connected to her father, who worked in the Philippines before he died.
War seems like a distant possibility as Rose takes midnight dips in a warm sea with the other nurses, explores secret corners of the island, and falls in love with a locally stationed US Army officer.
But when Japan bombs Manila, the nurses’ lives change. Torn away from the man she loves, Rose faces constant threat, not only to her life, but from those around her she thought she could trust…
Will Rose and those close to her survive in the turmoil of war?
The Umbrella Maker’s Son by Tod Lending
For fans of Heather Morris and Lisa Barr, a powerful and unforgettable novel of survival against all odds and the remarkable power of love, in which a Jewish teenager in World War II Poland fights to save his life and find the young woman who holds his heart.
Born to a secure, middle-class Polish Jewish family, seventeen-year-old Reuven works alongside his father, an artisan businessman whose shop creates the finest handmade umbrellas in Poland. But the family’s peaceful life shatters when the Nazis invade their homeland, igniting World War II. With terrifying brutality, the Nazis confiscate their business, evict them from their home, and strip away their rights, threatening the lives of the city’s Jewish population, including Reuven and Zelda, the girl he loves.
Shortly after the Nazi occupation, Zelda and her family disappear, and Reuven and his father are forced into backbreaking physical labor that nearly kills them. For the young man and his family, the only chance to survive is escape—and some of them will die trying.
Fleeing a Nazi ambush through the surrounding forest, shot and wounded, Reuven is found by a local farmer who has never met a Jew—and agrees to help because he needs the boy to work the farm with him. The farmer’s wife, however, is not as kind. Her betrayal forces a desperate Reuven to escape. He embarks on a perilous journey through the Polish countryside, determined to reach the Kraków ghetto where he hopes to reunite with Zelda, whose life has also been forever changed by the horrors of occupation and war.
A love story and a story of family, The Umbrella Maker’s Son is a riveting, heartfelt, and beautiful tale of survival and unexpected hope in the face of terror and violence. A chronicle of triumph, it joins the ranks of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and other memorable works of modern Holocaust literature.
Beneath the Sicilian Stars by Lindsay Marie Morris
A family divided by war… a promise forged beneath the Sicilian stars.
1941, Pittsburg, California. Sixteen-year-old Annalisa Aiello huddles around the radio with her family when a special announcement shatters her Pearl Harbor has been bombed – where her brother is stationed on the USS Arizona. After the United States declares war, Annalisa watches in horror as her father, a Sicilian fisherman, is arrested as an “enemy alien”. Grappling with grief and harsh wartime restrictions, Annalisa is forced to undertake an unexpected journey across the country to find her father and uncover the sacrifices of the past.
Meanwhile, in war-torn Sicily, her cousin Alberto navigates bombing raids as ancient fishing traditions crumble around him. But the forces tearing this family apart began decades earlier with a desperate choice made on a Sicilian shore – a secret pact sealed beneath the stars that promised a brighter future across the sea.
As Annalisa searches for her father and Alberto seeks his place in a changing world, they both discover that even in the darkest times, hope for a better future can endure.
From an American internment camp to Sicily’s bombed villages, Beneath the Sicilian Stars follows one family’s fight for survival, identity, and hope during World War II. Perfect for readers of Kelly Rimmer, Rhys Bowen and Angela Petch.
The Riveter by Jack Wang
In the vein of All the Light We Cannot See, a cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII.
Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to make a new life for himself. The Second World War is in full swing, and Josiah, like so many Canadians, wants to prove his loyalty by serving his country. But Chinese Canadians are barred from joining the army out of fear they might expect citizenship in return. So, Josiah heads to the shipyard where he finds work as a riveter, fastening together the ribs and steel plates of Victory ships.
One night, Josiah spots Poppy singing at a navy club. Despite their different backgrounds, they fall for each other instantly, and soon Josiah is spending his nights at Poppy’s small wartime house. Their starry-eyed romance lasts until Poppy’s father comes to visit and the harsh reality of their situation is made clear. Determined to prove himself to Poppy, her parents, and the world, Josiah travels to Toronto where he’s finally given the chance to enlist. Josiah rises to the occasion, but is the world changing as fast as his dreams?
From the critically acclaimed author of We Two Alone, Jack Wang’s gorgeous debut novel explores what one man must sacrifice to belong in the only home he has ever truly known.
The Dressmakers of London by Julia Kelly
The author of The Lost English Girl returns with a heartfelt new novel about estranged sisters who inherit their late mother’s dress shop in World War II London.
Isabelle Shelton has always found comfort in the predictable world of her mother’s dressmaking shop, Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions, while her sister Sylvia turned her back on the family years ago to marry a wealthy doctor whom Izzie detests. When their mother dies unexpectedly, the sisters are stunned to find they’ve jointly inherited the family business. Izzie is determined to buy Sylvia out, but when she’s conscripted into the WAAF, she’s forced to seek Sylvia’s help to keep the shop open. Realizing this could be her one chance at reconciliation with her sister, Sylvia is determined to save Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions from closure—and financial ruin.
Through letters, the sisters begin to confront old wounds, new loves, and the weight of family legacy in order to forge new beginnings in this lyrically moving novel.
Four Red Sweaters by Lucy Adlington
The New York Times bestselling author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz tells the stories of four Jewish girls during the Holocaust, strangers whose lives were unknowingly linked by everyday garments, revealing how the ordinary can connect us in extraordinary ways.
Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives. In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning clothes historian Lucy Adlington documents their stories, knitting together the experiences that fragmented their families and their lives.
Adlington immortalizes these young women whose resilience, skills, strength, and kindness accompanied them through the darkest events in human history. A powerful reminder of the suffering they endured and a celebration of courage, love, and tenacity, this moving and original work illuminates moments long lost to history, now pieced back together by a simple garment.
Four Red Sweaters is illustrated with more than two dozen black-and-white images throughout.
Propaganda Girls by Lisa Rogak
The incredible untold story of four women who helped win WWII by generating a wave of black propaganda.
Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane Smith-Hutton was the wife of a naval attaché living in Tokyo. Marlene Dietrich, the German-American actress and singer, was of course one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. These four women, each fascinating in her own right, together contributed to one of the most covert and successful military campaigns in WWII.
As members of the OSS, their task was to create a secret brand of propaganda produced with the sole aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers. Working in the European theater, across enemy lines in occupied China, and in Washington, D.C., Betty, Zuzka, Jane, and Marlene forged letters and “official” military orders, wrote and produced entire newspapers, scripted radio broadcasts and songs, and even developed rumors for undercover spies and double agents to spread to the enemy. And outside of a small group of spies, no one knew they existed. Until now.
In Propaganda Girls, bestselling author Lisa Rogak brings to vivid life the incredible true story of four unsung heroes, whose spellbinding achievements would change the course of history.
Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne
In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.
When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles,” he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”
Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz.
Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg—a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil—to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family’s past.
The Good Allies by Tim Cook
From our country’s most important war historian, a gripping account of the turbulent relationship between Canada and the US during the Second World War. The two nations entered the war amidst rivalry and mutual suspicion, but learned to fight together before emerging triumphant and bound by an alliance that has lasted to this day.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, it set in motion a deadly struggle between the Axis powers and the Allies, but also fraught negotiations between and among the Allies. On questions of diplomacy, economic policy, industrial might, military capabilities, and even national sovereignty, thousands of lives and the fate of the free world depended on back-room deals and desperate trade-offs between soldiers, diplomats, and leaders.
In North America, Canada and the US strained to forge a new military alliance to guard their coasts and fend off German U-boats and the menace of a Japanese invasion. Wartime economies were entwined to produce a staggering contribution of weapons to keep Britain and other allies in the war. The defense of North America against enemy threats was essential before the US and Canada could send armies, navies, and air forces overseas.
In his trademark style, Tim Cook employs eyewitness accounts to vividly lay bare the brutality of combat and the courage of North Americans under fire. Behind the fighting fronts, the charged and often secret communications between national leaders Churchill, Roosevelt, and King reveals how their personalities shaped the outcome of history’s most destructive war, the fate of the British Empire, and the North American alliance that lives on to this day.
The Good Allies is a masterful account of how Canadians and Americans made the transition from wary rivals to steadfast allies, and how Canada thrived in the shadow of the military and global superpower. In exploring this complex and crucial dimension of the Second World War and its legacy, Cook recounts two nations’ story of cooperation, of sacrifice, and of bleeding together to save the world from the fascist threat.
