8 Engrossing Books Like All the Light We Cannot See

Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, hoping to replicate some of the glitz and glamor of 1940s Hollywood and escape from her own working-class life. 

During the next four decades, Wang Qiyao finds herself in the heart of a changing political landscape that spans the Second World War, the Cultural Revolution, and the dawn of a new China, from communism to liberalism to the beginning of new world powers. By the 1980s, Wang Qiyao seems to have survived it all, only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the pulpy Hollywood noirs of her youth.

Travel writer Gretel Ehrlich has written frequently on life in Wyoming, where she lived on a ranch for many years. Her debut novel, Heart Mountain, follows a dark moment in American history where the U.S. government rounded up its own citizens and placed them in camps during the Second World War. 

Set at the real-life Heart Mountain Relocation Center, the novel trails a group of Japanese Americans who are forced into internment. In the nearby town of Luster, the residents contend with this political strife and are forced to confront their own prejudices as the paranoia of war seeps into every aspect of their lives.

On the day the Nazis march down the Rue de Belleville, the situation proves all too familiar to the Pegorian family. Like many other Armenians who survived the genocide in their homeland, they emigrated to France to build a new life, one that was meant to be free from war. As the adults go to work stockpiling food and provisions, 14-year-old Maral and her brother Missak are spurred to action of another sort, finding secret and not-so-secret ways to resist their oppressors. 

When their best friend Zaven flees with his brother Barkev to avoid conscription, the true price of war becomes clearer than ever to the previously optimistic Maral. Survival is never guaranteed during wartime, but that doesn't mean one can't be hopeful.

The Second World War has left the people of Britain in a state of fear, even though the action is happening hundreds of miles away. When widow Millie Sanger finds injured enemy pilot Lukas Schiller on her farm, the reality of WW2 is suddenly at her doorstep. Millie knows that Lukas will be killed if he's discovered, and she'll be labelled a traitor for helping him, but she cannot stand to see him in pain and makes the dangerous decision to offer him shelter from the storm. 

The pair soon forge an unexpected and passionate bond, one that can never be exposed. As war forces them apart again, Millie's good deed sets them on paths they never could have expected.

In October 1940, as the storm clouds of World War II gathered, the SS Atlantic set sail for Palestine, hoping to find refuge for hundreds of Jewish Germans and Austrians fleeing the Nazi regime. But they were denied solace and forced to go elsewhere. Boat of Stone follows the Atlantic as it deals with epidemics, food shortages, and a period of incarceration in a British penal colony off the eastern coast of Africa.

Irène Némirovsky was a Ukranian Jewish writer who lived most of her life in France. After the Nazis took over the country, she was arrested and murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. The notebook containing her unfinished masterpiece, Suite Française, was discovered and preserved by her daughters for decades before being published to great acclaim in 2004. 

The first part of the story (Némirovsky's plan was to write five but only completed two) opens in 1940 as Parisians try to flee the city of the eve of the Nazi invasion. People must decide whether or not to leave behind everything, and desperation reaches its peak as the hunger to survive takes over all. The second part shows life in a German-occupied provincial village, where the French must try to live alongside their Nazi occupiers. Some choose to collaborate while others resist.

In 1939, the Nazis have thoroughly taken over every aspect of life in Germany and war is on the horizon. For young Liesel, life only grows more complicated. By her brother's graveside, she discovers a book, The Gravedigger's Handbook, and she steals it. So begins a love affair with the written word that must survive a war dominated by a regime who burns them and hates knowledge. 

When Liesel's foster family, including her loving father who taught her how to read, hides a young Jewish person in their basement, their whole world threatens to come crashing down. And watching it all unfold, narrating for the reader, is Death himself.

Dorrigo Evans has found fame in his old age as a celebrated war veteran, but for the man himself, the trauma and guilt of what he experienced during the Second World War runs deep. After joining the Australian Imperial Force, Dorrigo's regiment was captured and sent to do hard labour on the notorious Burma Death Railway. 

As a prisoner of war in an area where one out of every three soldiers died during the railway's construction, Dorrigo finds himself sustained only by the memory of Amy, the wife of his uncle with whom he had an affair. The scars of war run deep, as do those of the loss that Dorrigo experiences at every turn over the decades.