Hey guys. Not been here for a while, but I'm looking for a recommendation, so this is the first place I thought of to come and ask.
I'm looking for good World War II fiction. I don't have a particular leaning towards a certain niche. Just something well written.
Thanks in advance.
For what it's worth:
Harry Turtledove is considered one of the best, and has written plenty about WW2 in various iterations, but you quickly spot his habits and get annoyed by their repetition. Robert Conroy is another prolific writer, but his prose is even worse that Turtledove's IMO.
For Turtledove, there is the World War tetralogy, featuring an alien invasion in 1942, forcing the human combatants to put aside their conflict to fight together. It was followed up by a trilogy set in the sixties, with a world much changed by a different outcome to World War 2.
- Settling Accounts tetralogy. Actually the conclusion of a series, with seven prior books, the premise is basically the World Wars, if the South had won the American Civil Wars. Three books cover the first World War fought in North America, between the USA & Confederacy, who are allied to the Central Powers and the Allies, respectively. There is an interwar trilogy and finally, the Settling Accounts section is four books about the American nations fighting World War 2, complete with nukes and a Holocaust on American soil.
- The War That Came Early. A currently on-going series (book 6 is due in July) about World War 2 breaking out as a result of the Munich Conference breaking down. Poland is a German ally, for example, while Czechoslovakia fights for the Allies, and the Spanish Civil War is concurrent with, and affecting the larger conflict.
- The Man with the Iron Heart. A standalone novel, where the alternative is that Reinhard Heydrich is not assassinated in 1942, and goes on to prepare a substantial resistance movement in anticipation of a German defeat. The novel is about the struggle of the Allies to maintain an occupation of Germany in the face of a guerrilla war akin to (and blatantly inspired by) that of modern Iraq.
- Pearl Harbor duology. A pair of books, "Days of Infamy" and "End of the Beginning" in which the Japanese follow up their attack on Pearl Harbor with an invasion and occupation. The focus is on the lives of Japanese soldiers and tribulations of the American residents under Imperial Japanese rule.
There was a trilogy by John Birmingham that I cannot recall the names of (Weapons of Choice is one of the books, I'm pretty sure) where a multinational task force accidentally goes back in time to collide with the American fleet en route to Midway, with the Americans, Germans, Japanese and Soviets all acquiring modern-to-future technology, and pausing the war to rearm with more advanced equipment before going at it again. IMO, slightly better written that Turtledove, with some interesting contrasts of contemporary mentalities and 1940s mindsets, but more science-fiction than history, alternate or otherwise.
There are a number of even more inferior works I've read as Kindle e-books. My interest in World War Two is purely historical, so I'm afraid I have not read much real fiction about it. I mostly regard that era with a considerable degree of disgust, contempt and outrage, with all the major parties involved being absolutely deplorable in their conduct. Seriously, the only countries I can bring myself to "root" for are Poland and Finland, who mostly took it up the ass, despite heroism all out of proportion to the credit they generally receive in conventional history. With that in mind, I suppose it's obvious why I only read alternate history for fiction about that period - almost any sort of alternative outcome can be more happy than the actual events. But there is some value in alternative history, in that to consider the likely path resulting from different events, the author has to first be familiar with the real history, and thus such works can be an interesting illustration of the period from a perspective that might not normally be considered.
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