Before We Were Yours

Books like Before We Were Yours

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August 30, 2022
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#1 Beneath A Scarlet Sky

Beneath a Scarlet Sky is the victorious, epic account of one young man’s tremendous fortitude and resiliency during one of history’s darkest periods. It is based on the true story of a forgotten hero.

Pino Lella is opposed to both the Nazis and the war. He is a typical Italian adolescent who is fascinated with food, music, and girls, but his days of youth are numbered. Pino joins an underground railroad to aid Jews fleeing from the Alps when the bombs dropped by the Allies destroy his family’s home in Milan. He also falls in love with Anna, a stunning widow who is six years his senior. Pino’s parents push him to enlist as a German soldier in an effort to protect him, believing that this will keep him out of battle.

#2 Nightingale

American author Kristin Hannah’s historical fiction book The Nightingale was released by St. Martin’s Press in 2015. The book tells the tale of two sisters who fought to survive and oppose the German occupation of France during World War II while living in France.

Vianne Mauriac bids her husband Antoine farewell in the tranquil village of Carriveau as he departs for the Front. She doesn’t think the Nazis will take over France. However, they do invade in large numbers of marching soldiers, convoys of trucks and tanks, and planes that fill the sky and rain bombs on defenseless people. Vianne and her daughter are forced to coexist with the enemy when a German captain seizes their home. Otherwise, they risk losing everything. She is compelled to make one impossible decision after another in order to keep her family alive when they are without food, money, or hope and as danger mounts all around them.

#3 The Four Winds

Texas, 1934. The Great Plains are in a drought, and millions of people are jobless. As crops fail, water runs out, and dust threatens to bury everyone, farmers are fighting to maintain their land and their means of subsistence. The Dust Bowl era, one of the worst parts of the Great Depression, has descended with a vengeance.

Elsa Martinelli, like so many of her neighbors, is forced to choose between fighting for the land she loves and moving to California in quest of a better life in this uncertain and frightening period. A generation will be defined by the heroism and sacrifice of one unbreakable woman, whose book The Four Winds is an unforgettable portrayal of America and the American Dream.

#4 The Great Alone

Former POW Ernt Allbright returns from the Vietnam War a different and more violent person. He takes an impetuous decision to relocate his family to Alaska, where they’ll live off the net in the country’s final true frontier, after losing yet another job.

Leni, a 13-year-old girl growing up at a turbulent time and trapped in the riptide of her passionate, turbulent connection with her parents, dares to dream that moving to a new country may bring about a better future for her family. She is in dire need of a place to call home. Cora, her mother, is willing to go to any lengths for the man she adores, even if it involves pursuing him into the dark.

#5 All The Light We Cannot See

Marie-Laure, whose father works at the Museum of Natural History, resides in Paris close by. When Marie-Laure is twelve years old, the Nazis have taken over Paris, and her father and daughter leave for Saint-Malo, a walled city where Marie-great Laure’s uncle lives alone in a tall home by the sea. They may be transporting the most priceless and hazardous treasure in the museum.

Orphan Werner Pfennig grows up in a mining village in Germany with his younger sister, fascinated by a rudimentary radio they discover that transmits news and tales from locations they have never visited or imagined. Werner gains proficiency in creating and maintaining these essential new tools and is hired to use his skill to find the resistance. Doerr skillfully illustrates the ways people attempt to be kind to one another in spite of all circumstances by weaving together the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner.

#6 The Tattooist Of Auschwitz

Lale Sokolov, a Jew from Slovakia, is forcibly sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in April 1942. He is hired as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), entrusted with permanently marking his fellow inmates after his captors learned that he speaks multiple languages.

Lale, who has been jailed for more than 2.5 years, sees unbelievable acts of courage and kindness in addition to horrifying horrors and cruelty. He puts his own life in danger by using his position of power to buy food for his fellow captives by exchanging jewelry and money from dead Jews.