What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorManhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan · 480 pages
"Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always bel
Lilac Girls
Martha Hall Kelly · 512 pages
Inspired by the life of a real World War II heroine, this debut novel reveals a story of love, redemption, and secrets that were hidden for decades. New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline’s world is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939—and then sets its sights on Fr
Mrs. Roosevelt’s Confidante
Susan Elia MacNeal · 337 pages
Maggie Hope, travels across the pond to America, where a looming scandal poses a grave threat to the White House and the Allied cause. December 1941. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill arrives in Washington, D.C., along with special agent Maggie Hope. Posing as his typist, she is accompanying the prime minister as he meets with President Roosevelt to negotiate the United Stat
Anchor in the Storm
Sarah Sundin · 393 pages
"Nothing slows Lillian Avery down--not her personal challenges and certainly not America's entry into World War II. She finally has a chance to prove herself as a pharmacist in Boston. The demands of her new job energize her. But society boy Ensign Archer Vandenberg's attentions only annoy--even if he is her brother's best friend. During the darkest days of the war, Arch's destroyer hunts German U
Red Joan
Jennie Rooney · 392 pages
"Inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, a woman unmasked in 1999, at age 87, as the KGB's longest-serving British spy, Red Joan centers on the deeply conflicted life of a brilliant young physicist during the Second World War ... Risking both career and conscience, leaking information to the Soviets, but struggling to maintain her own semblance of morality, Joan is caught at a crossroads in
A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald
Natasha Lester · 416 pages
The Last Camellia
Sarah Jio · 306 pages
"On the eve of the Second World War, the last surviving specimen of a camellia plant known as the Middlebury Pink lies secreted away on an English country estate. Flora, an amateur American botanist, is contracted by an international ring of flower thieves to infiltrate the household and acquire the coveted bloom. Her search is at once brightened by new love and threatened by her discovery of a se
Deadly
Julie Chibbaro
In the early nineteen-hundreds, sixteen-year-old Prudence Galewski leaves school to take a job assisting the head epidemiologist at New York's Department of Health and Sanitation, investigating the intriguing case of "Thyphoid Mary," a seemingly healthy woman who is infecting others with typhoid fever. Includes a historical note by the author.
The Gilded Hour
Sara Donati · 741 pages
The year is 1883, and in New York City, it's a time of dizzying splendor, crushing poverty, and tremendous change. With the gravity-defying Brooklyn Bridge nearly complete and New York in the grips of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, Anna Savard and her cousin Sophie--both graduates of the Woman's Medical School--treat the city's most vulnerable, even if doing so may put everything they've str
Studio Saint-Ex
Ania Szado · 358 pages
In fashion-driven 1940s New York, ambitious fashion designer Mignonne Lachapelle falls for French expatriate writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery, while the author's estranged Salvadoran wife, Consuelo, is determined to win him back at all costs.
Overseas
Beatriz Williams · 456 pages
When twenty-something Wall Street analyst Kate Wilson attracts the notice of the legendary Julian Laurence at a business meeting, no one’s more surprised than she is. Julian’s relentless energy and his extraordinary intellect electrify her, but she’s baffled by his sudden interest. Why would this handsome British billionaire "Manhattan’s most eligible bachelor” pursue a pretty but bookish young ba
Flygirl
Sherri L. Smith · 296 pages
During World War II, a light-skinned African American girl "passes" for white in order to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots.
Cinderella's Dress
Shonna Slayton · 322 pages
"Being seventeen during World War II is tough. Finding out you're the next keeper of the real Cinderella's dress is even tougher. Kate simply wants to create window displays at the department store where she's working, trying to help out with the war effort. But when long-lost relatives from Poland arrive with a steamer trunk they claim holds the Cinderella's dress, life gets complicated. Now, wit
The Butterfly and the Violin
Kristy Cambron · 336 pages
Manhattan art dealer Sera James watched her world crumble at the altar two years ago, and her heart is still fragile. Manhattan art dealer Sera James watched her world crumble at the altar two years ago, and her desire for distraction reignites a passion for a mysterious portrait she first saw as a young girl: a painting of a young violinist with piercing blue eyes. Sera crosses paths with Willia
The Muralist
B.A. Shapiro · 337 pages
When Alizée Benoit, a young American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her arts patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends and fellow WPA painters, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Kr
Brookland
Emily Barton · 496 pages
"Since her girlhood, Prudence Winship has gazed across the tidal straits from her home in Brooklyn to the city of Manhattan and yearned to bridge the distance. Now, firmly established as the owner of an enormously successful gin distillery she inherited from her father, she can begin to realize her dream. Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn, this is the beautifully written story of a woman with a v
The Letter Writer
Dan Fesperman · 506 pages
"From the author of Unmanned: a riveting new thriller that unfolds in New York City four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor--a story that pits the guardians of possibly traitorous secrets against two men who are intent on bringing those secrets to light. February 1942: Woodrow Cain arrives in New York City from a small North Carolina town having left behind a wife (who'd abandoned him), a dau
The Girl is Murder
Kathryn Miller Haines · 368 pages
In 1942 New York City, fifteen-year-old Iris grieves for her mother who committed suicide and for the loss of her life of privilege, and secretly helps her father with his detective business since he, having lost a leg at Pearl Harbor, struggles to make ends meet.
The Sweetness
Sande Boritz Berger · 307 pages
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon · 639 pages
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar
The Invention of Everything Else
Samantha Hunt · 272 pages
Louisa is an imaginative and curious chambermaid who, while cleaning rooms at the New Yorker Hotel, stumbles across a man living permanently in room 3327, which he has transformed into a scientific laboratory. Brought together by a shared interest in the pigeons that nest in the hotel, Louisa discovers that the mysterious guest is Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant – and most neglected – inve
While We're Far Apart
Lynn Austin · 411 pages
"In an unassuming apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, three lives intersect as the reality of war invades their lives. Young Esther is heartbroken when her father decides to enlist in the army shortly after the death of her mother. Penny Goodrich has been in love with Eddie Shaffer for as long as she can remember; now that Eddie's wife is dead, Penny feels that she's been given a second chan
Grand Central: Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion
Jenna Blum, Melanie Benjamin, Kristina McMorris, Karen White, Erika Robuck, Alyson Richman, Pam Jenoff, Sarah Jio, Amanda Hodgkinson, Sarah McCoy · 356 pages
Presents short stories that all take place in and around New York City's Grand Central Station on the day after World War II ends, including contributions from such authors as Melanie Benjamin, Sarah Jio, and Amanda Hodgkinson.