We have curated a collection of recommended reads for D-Day, this book list contains fiction from romance to thriller.
You can read Community Memories of the War in our guest article!
District Nurses Make A Wish by Annie Groves
For the district nurses of Victory Walk, there’s been little time to bask in the triumph of D-day as London is facing a new threat – the buzz bombs. Everyone is terrified, never knowing where the next one will strike. Into this tense atmosphere, new nurse, Iris, must make her mark. She’s had more experience of nursing than many, but since arriving in East London from the countryside, she has struggled to fit in with the other staff.
Meanwhile Alice is facing an agonising wait to hear if her boyfriend Joe has survived D-day – she can barely sleep for wondering if he ever received her letter in which she promised to wait for him? Others too are in limbo, not knowing if their loved ones have made it through. With the end almost in sight, the district nurses must dig deep if they are to keep London going…
Sing Them Home by Pam Weaver
1942: A German aircraft crashes into a house in Worthing and causes complete devastation to the local community.
Three strangers meet for the first time that day – Pip, Stella and Lillian. Lillian’s little girl Flora has been hurt in the crash and is rushed to hospital. As she comes through her ordeal, she finds her mother and her two new ‘aunties’ by her bedside.
The three new friends quickly bond over shared experiences; all their husbands are overseas in the fighting forces. They also have the same love of singing and soon form the Sussex Sisters, Worthing’s answer to the Andrews Sisters.
When D-Day finally arrives, it’s the promise of a brighter future they have all been longing for. But the men who return home are altogether different from the husbands they waved off…
Eye Of The Needle by Ken Follett
His weapon is the stiletto, his codename: The Needle. He is Hitler’s prize undercover agent – a cold and professional killer.
It is 1944 and weeks before D-Day. The Allies are disguising their invasion plans with a phoney armada of ships and planes. Their plan would be ruined if an enemy agent found out . . . and then The Needle does just that. Hunted by MI5, he leads a murderous trail across Britain to a waiting U-Boat. But he hasn’t planned for a storm-battered island, and the remarkable young woman who lives there . . .
This book is part of our Centenary Collection!
Winter Agent by Gareth Rubin
February, 1944. A bitter winter grips occupied France, where Marc Reece leads an SOE circuit facing deadly risks, operating in secret to sabotage the German war effort. But Marc has a second mission, secret from even his fellow agents – including Charlotte, the woman with whom he has ill-advisedly fallen in love.
Everyone knows that D-Day is coming, and that the hours following the Allied landings will decide the war – and every last scrap of information he can provide might make all the difference to the fate of the Western world.
But when the circuit is ambushed – with deadly consequences – Marc realises there may be a spy in their ranks, putting at risk everything they’ve been fighting for. Then Charlotte goes missing.
Gift For The District Nurses by Annie Groves
It’s 1943 and the district nurses have two new recruits. As the country ramps up for D-Day, the new nurses getting to know their patients on their patch in London’s East End. Lily is quite sure of herself and doesn’t believe she has anything new to learn.
She’ll find out the hard way that anyone can be made a fool of when she meets a man who promises her everything. Ruby thinks that nursing might not be for her – is she as hopeless as she thinks, or will tough times bring out the best in her?
As the war takes on a new urgency, everything is at stake – can the nurses do what is right for the country and for themselves?
Dagger Of Death At Honeychurch Hall by Hannah Dennison
At last St Mary’s church is going to have its own vicar! Not only that, the gorgeous Reverend Pritchard is sixty, single and in need of a wife.
But when he spearheads a campaign to restore a derelict chapel – rumoured to be haunted by a German Luftwaffe pilot – in a far-flung corner of the Honeychurch estate, the Dowager Countess puts her foot down. But nobody quite understands why.
Meanwhile, a fierce bidding war at an auction of military memorabilia ends in Kat’s female adversary being murdered and Kat being held as the prime suspect.
And then it turns out that several of the auctioned items are connected to Operation Tiger, a doomed rehearsal for the D-Day landings that took place in nearby Slapton Sands all those years ago. And Kat begins to realise that the vicar, the Luftwaffe ghost and all the World War II weaponry may all somehow be related.
Vera’s Valour by Anne Holman
Vera’s life, as a wartime bride and British restaurant cook, is thrown into turmoil when she is handed a vitally important message for her Royal Engineer husband – just after he has departed for D-Day preparations. She eventually catches up with him, but danger is all around them.
With A Kiss And A Prayer by Ellie Dean
It’s the end of May 1944 and the rumours are growing of an impending allied invasion into France. The wireless is now the background noise of everyday life in Cliffehaven, and everything stops in the factories, homes and pubs when the news comes on.
But Peggy and the residents of Beach View have other concerns. As D-Day draws closer, it’s not just the course of war that’s causing havoc in Cliffehaven.
Should You Ask Me by Marianne Kavanagh
Just before D-Day in 1944, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, an elderly woman walks into a police station. She has information, she says, about human remains recently discovered nearby. The bodies could have stayed buried for ever – like the love and the hatred that put them there.
But Mary Holmes is finally ready to tell her story. The young constable sent to take her statement is still suffering from the injuries that ended his army career. As he tries to make sense of her tale, William finds himself increasingly distracted.
Mary’s confession forces his own violent memories to the surface – betrayals and regrets as poorly healed as his war wounds.
The Armada Boy by Kate Ellis
When archaeologist Neil Watson finds the body of an American veteran of the D-Day landings in the ruins of an old chapel, he turns to his old friend DS Wesley Peterson for help.
Both men are researching an invading force: Wesley, a group of American veterans on a sentimental journey to their wartime base; and Neil, a group of Spaniards killed by outraged locals as they limped from the wreckage of the Armada.
Four hundred years apart, two strangers in a strange land have died violently. Could the same motives of hatred, jealousy and revenge be at work? Wesley is running out of time to find out.
Canary Girls by Rosie Archer
In love and war, who can you trust? 1944, Hampshire. Her face still bearing the scars from the explosion at the factory, Rita Brown is nonetheless back on her feet. She’s caught the eye of local wide boy Blackie Bristow, who’s sweeping her around the country in a life of shady glamour.
But there’s a war on, and life is not all fun and games. Some of the local men are taking advantage of the topsy-turvy world to break more than just hearts, and standing up to them comes with its own costs. Rita keeps calm and carries on with a little help from her friends at the factory.
But then she discovers someone there has been leaking secrets to the Germans. With D-Day on the horizon, Rita must work out who she can rely on – and fast.
Liberation Square by Gareth Rubin
952. Soviet troops control British streets. After the disastrous failure of D-Day, Britain is occupied by Nazi Germany, and only rescued by Russian soldiers arriving from the east and Americans from the west. The two superpowers divide the nation between them, a wall running through London like a scar.
When Jane Cawson calls into her husband’s medical practice and detects the perfume worn by his former wife, Lorelei, star of propaganda films for the new Marxist regime, she fears what is between them.
But when Jane rushes to confront them, she finds herself instead caught up in the glamorous actress’s death. Nick is soon arrested for murder.
Desperate to clear his name, Jane must risk the attention of the brutal secret police as she follows a trail of corruption right to the highest levels of the state. And she might find she never really knew her husband at all.
Aurore by Graham Hurley
Aurore connects Billy Angell, an RAF wireless operator selected for a covert mission to occupied France, with Hélène Lafosse, a French woman keeping unusual company in her small family chateau in the depths of the Touraine.
Hélène has begun an affair with a senior Abwehr Intelligence officer and in return he has turned a blind eye to the succession of Jews, refugees, resistance fighters and downed Allied airmen to whom she offers shelter.
MI6 want to exploit their relationship and plant a false lead about the D-Day landings. It falls to Billy to find his way to the Chateau de Neune where he must win Hélène’s confidence and share the tiny piece of the intelligence jigsaw that will only make sense to her German lover.
Before The Dawn by Emma Pass
It’s 1943, and the Second World War is raging. Ruby Mottram works for her local newspaper, the ‘Bartonford Herald,’ typing up adverts and obituaries, whilst dreaming of a more exciting life.
Between her shifts as an ARP warden and caring for her ailing father, the chance for escape doesn’t come often to Devon. Meanwhile, in America’s deep south, Sam Archer is hatching a plan to raise enough money to get his mother and sister away from his abusive stepfather.
Using falsified documents to hide his age, he enlists with the U.S. Army. Two chance encounters bring Ruby and Sam together from opposite sides of the Atlantic, giving them the chance of love, hope and freedom from their troubled lives.
But fate, in the shape of D-Day and Omaha Beach, has other ideas. When their very lives are at risk, will their promise to wait for one another be what keeps them alive?
Marriage And Mayhem For The Tobacco Girls by Lizzie Lane
May 1944. Hope and excitement is in the air when news breaks of the allied forces landing in Normandy. D-Day has arrived.
However, the day-to-day struggles for the Tobacco Girls continue. Carole Thomas wants her old life back. She is burdened with the guilt of being a young single mother and considers having baby Paula adopted, but Maisie Miles will do anything to stop her.
Phyllis Mason having found the love of her life is getting married in Malta to Mick Fairbrother, but will the dangerous legacies of war plague her happy day? Bridget O’Neill finds herself posted to one of the hospitals receiving the injured from the D-Day landing beaches.
Her most fervent hope is that her husband, Lyndon, does not become one of them. Peace is on the horizon, but will their wishes and dreams win through and bring them a happy ever after?