This New York Times bestselling account of books parachuted to soldiers during WWII is a “cultural history that does much to explain modern America” (USA Today).
When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops, gathering 20 million hardcover donations. Two years later, the

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Enduring privation when Japan declares war on England, a teacher at a British missionary school in China is sent to a distant internment camp, where she provides support and instruction to incarcerated children taken from their parents. China, December 1941. Elspeth Kent left England for a teaching post at a missionary school in northern China. Ten-year-old Nancy Plummer has always felt safe at Chefoo School, protected by her British status. When...

"Bridey Kelly has come to Greenway House--the beloved holiday home of Agatha Christie--in disgrace. A terrible mistake at St. Prisca's Hospital in London has led to her dismissal as a nurse trainee, and her only chance for redemption is a position in the countryside caring for children evacuated to safety from the Blitz. Greenway is a beautiful home full of riddles: wondrous curios not to be touched, restrictions on rooms not to be entered, and a...

At 8:06 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Seaman First Class Donald Stratton was consumed by an inferno. A million pounds of explosives had detonated beneath his battle station aboard the USS Arizona, barely fifteen minutes into Japan's surprise attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. Near death and burned across two thirds of his body, Don, a 19-year-old Nebraskan who had been steeled by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, summoned the will to haul himself...

France, 1914. Aurelie becomes trapped on the wrong side of the front with her father, Comte Sigismund de Courcelles. When the Germans move into their family's ancestral estate, Aurelie discovers she knows the German Major's aide de camp, Maximilian Von Sternburg. Betrayal will shatter them both. France, 1942. Raised by her American grandmother in the Hotel Ritz, Marguerite 'Daisy' Villon remains in Paris with her daughter and husband, a Nazi collaborator,...

A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich" (Washington Post).
The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers...

In 1946, as London emerges from the shadow of World War II, author Juliet Ashton is having a terrible time finding inspiration for her next book. Then she receives a letter from Guernsey Island, and learns of a unique book club formed on the spur of the moment as an alibi to protect its members from arrest by the occupying Germans during the war. Captivated, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds there will change her life forever.

"A world at war. A beautiful young star. A mission no one expected. Paris, 1944. Celebrated singer Genevieve Dumont is both a star and a smokescreen. An unwilling darling of the Nazis, the chanteuse's position of privilege allows her to go undetected as an ally to the resistance. When her estranged mother, Lillian de Rocheford, is captured by Nazis, Genevieve knows it won't be long before the Gestapo succeeds in torturing information out of Lillian...

Set against the backdrop of World War II, this unforgettable novel, inspired by the true story of the Council of Books in Wartime, follows three women whose fates become intertwined by their belief in the power and goodness in the written word to triumph over the very darkest moments of war. Berlin 1933. Following the success of her debut novel, American writer Althea James receives an invitation from Joseph Goebbels himself to participate in a culture...

Elise Sontag is a typical Iowa fourteen-year-old in 1943--aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathizer. The family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, behind the armed guards and barbed wire, Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar, including her own identity. The only thing that makes the camp bearable...