For Iris, each visit to her mother in St Mabon’s Cove, Cornwall has been the same—a serene escape from the city. But today, as she breaths in the salt air on the doorstep of her beloved childhood home, a heavy weight of anticipation settles over her. Iris knows she’s adopted, but any questions about where she came from have always been shut down by her parents, who can’t bear to revisit the past. Now, Iris can’t stop thinking about what she’s read on the official paperwork: BABY GIRL, FRANCE, 1939 – the year war was declared with Nazi Germany.

London, 1941. The Blitz. When a Royal Navy memo arrives at head office, requesting female recruits to sign up as motorcycle dispatch riders, delivering highly classified orders across the country, three women jump at the chance to sign up for the most dangerous jobs in London.

Londoner Madeleine Grant is studying at the Sorbonne in Paris when she marries charismatic French journalist Giles Martin. As they raise their son, Olivier, they hold on to a tenuous promise for the future. Until the thunder of war sets off alarms in France. Staying behind to join the resistance, Giles sends Madeleine and Olivier to the relative safety of England, where Madeleine secures a job teaching French at a secondary school. Yet nowhere is safe. After a devastating twist of fate resulting in the loss of her son, Madeleine accepts a request from the ministry to aid in the war effort.

Sophie Dix fled Stuttgart with her brother as the Nazi regime gained power in Germany. Now, with her brother gone and her adopted home city of Paris conquered by the Reich, Sophie reluctantly accepts a position restoring damaged art at the Jeu de Paume museum under the supervision of the ERR—a German art commission using the museum as a repository for art they’ve looted from Jewish families.

Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While war ravages the city above her, Clara has risked everything she holds dear to turn the Bethnal Green tube station into the country’s only underground library. Down here, a secret community thrives with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a café, and a theater—offering shelter, solace, and escape from the bombs that fall upon their city. Along with her glamorous best friend and assistant Ruby Munroe, Clara ensures the library is the beating heart of life underground. As the war drags on, the women's determination is tested to the limits.

At the end of her first unsuccessful season out in society, Lady Georgiana has all but given up on attracting a suitable man - until she receives an invitation to a masked Halloween ball at Broxley Manor. Georgie is uncertain why she was invited, until she learns that the royal family intends to marry her off to a foreign prince, one reputed to be mad.

June 1940. While her little sister, Rosie, is sent to the UK to keep her safe from the invading German army, Estelle Le Maistre is left behind on Jersey to help her grandmother run the family farm. When the Germans occupy the island, everything changes and Estelle and the islanders must face the reality of life under Nazi rule.

Juliette and her husband have finally made it to France on the romantic getaway of her dreams—but as the days pass, all she discovers is quite how far they’ve grown apart. She’s craving a new adventure, so when she happens across a tiny, abandoned shop with a for-sale sign in the window, it feels fated. And she’s about to learn that the forgotten bookshop hides a lot more than meets the eye.

Paris, 1943. German soldiers drag me out onto the cobbled street and push me toward the waiting truck. I force myself to face forward as tears stream down my cheeks. If I look back, they’ll know. I can’t let them find my baby girl....

Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now 15 and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border, believing her neighbors that they pose no real threat, and dreams instead of the day Tomasz returns from college in Warsaw so they can be married. But little by little, injustice by brutal injustice, the Nazi occupation takes hold, and Alina’s tiny rural village, its families, are divided by fear and hate. Then, as the fabric of their lives is slowly picked apart, Tomasz disappears.

Java Island, 1941. Six-year-old Rita Vischer cowers in her family’s dug-out bomb shelter, listening to the sirens and waiting for a bomb to fall. Her charmed life on Java—living with other Dutch families—had always been peaceful, but when Holland declares war on Japan and the Japanese army invades Indonesia, Rita’s family is forced to relocate to a POW camp, and Rita must help care for her little brother, Georgie.

All her life, Zofia has found comfort in two things during times of hardship: books and her best friend, Janina. But no one could have imagined the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw. As the bombs rain down and Hitler’s forces loot and destroy the city, Zofia finds that now books are also in need of saving. With the death count rising and persecution intensifying, Zofia jumps to action to save her friend and salvage whatever books she can from the wreckage, hiding them away, and even starting a clandestine book club.

London, 1940. Bombs fall and Josie Banks’ world crumbles around her. Her overbearing husband, Stan, is unreachable, called to service. Her home, a ruin of rubble and ash. Josie’s beloved tearoom boss has been killed, and Josie herself is injured, with nothing left and nowhere to go. Evacuated to the English countryside, Josie ends up at the estate of the aristocratic Miss Harcourt, a reluctant host to the survivors of the Blitz. Now a threat looms larger than anyone imagined. And a dangerous secret is about to upend Josie’s life again.

1920s Germany: Though the world has changed in the wake of the Great War, it is still ruled by men. Even a woman as resourceful and intelligent as Niki Rittenhaus needs alliances in order to survive. Her marriage to Rickard Länger, a movie producer for Berlin's Passport Pictures, seems convenient for them both. When Rickard succumbs to increasing pressure from the Nazis to make propaganda movies, a horrified Niki turns away from her own film aspirations and instead, begins to write.

While the France they have known is crumbling around them, two courageous women face danger and betrayal under Hitler's tyranny. Giselle Munier and Jean Thornton are more like sisters than cousins, having spent many of their summers together, but with the outbreak of World War II, both women's lives take a dramatic turn.

England, 1959: Laurel Nicolson is 16 years old, dreaming alone in her childhood tree house during a family celebration at their home, Green Acres Farm. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and then observes her mother, Dorothy, speaking to him. And then she witnesses a crime.

Brought to the peace conference by her father, a German diplomat, Margot Rosenthal initially resents being trapped in the congested French capital, where she is still looked upon as the enemy. But as she contemplates returning to Berlin and a life with Stefan, the wounded fiancé she hardly knows anymore, she decides that being in Paris is not so bad after all. Bored and torn between duty and the desire to be free, Margot strikes up unlikely alliances: with Krysia, an accomplished musician with radical acquaintances and a secret to protect; and with Georg, the handsome, damaged naval officer who gives Margot a job.

Liverpool, 1940. When her childhood sweetheart, Johnny, is killed in action, Maxine Grey loses more than her husband - she loses her best friend. Desperate to make a difference in this awful war, Maxine takes a nursing job at London’s St Thomas’ hospital. She takes comfort in the attentions of a handsome surgeon, but Edwin Blake isn’t all he seems. And as the Blitz descends on the capital, Maxine faces more heartache. When she returns to Liverpool, she harbours a secret.

East London, 1888 - a city apart. A place of shadow and light where thieves, whores, and dreamers mingle, where children play in the cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night, where bright hopes meet the darkest truths. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, hopes to own a shop one day, together with her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a costermonger's son. With nothing but their faith in each other to spur them on, Fiona and Joe struggle, save, and sacrifice to achieve their dreams.

Three very different girls sign up as trainee nurses at a big London teaching hospital in 1934. Dora leaves her overcrowded, squalid working-class home for a better life. But has she got what it takes to keep up with other, better-educated girls? And will her hated stepfather ever let her go? Helen is born for the job; her brother is a doctor, her all-powerful mother a hospital trustee. But will Helen’s secret misery be her downfall? An aristocratic rebel, Millie’s carefree attitude will find her up in front of Matron again and again. Will she ever care enough to make a nurse? Or will she go back to the glamorous life she was born to?

Winter in Madrid is set just after the bloody Spanish Civil War, with World War II looming over Europe. Reluctantly, Harry Brett looks for an old schoolmate who's become a person of interest for British intelligence.

At the Medio School for Girls, distinguished young women are trained for one of two roles in their polarized society. Depending on her specialization, a graduate will one day run a husband’s household or raise his children. Both paths promise a life of comfort and luxury, far from the frequent political uprisings of the lower class. Daniela Vargas is the school’s top student, but her pedigree is a lie. She must keep the truth hidden or be sent back to the fringes of society. And school couldn’t prepare her for the difficult choices she must make after graduation.

In the aftermath of WWI, Grace Abernathy is determined to reunite with her family, crossing an ocean to convince her widowed sister to return home to England. But Toronto holds more tragedy and her nephew, Christian, is now in the custody of his paternal relatives, the formidable Easton family, who rejected Grace's sister because of her low social status. Unconvinced that the Eastons can be fitting caretakers, Grace jumps at the chance to become Christian's nanny and to observe the family up close. But she is shocked to discover herself falling for Andrew Easton, the boy's guardian.

Rural China, 1942. Twenty-two-year-old Eugenia Baker exists in a bubble as yet untouched by WWII. Content to help her father with his missionary work, Genie sees her future as a straight, if narrow, road - until an American pilot arrives, warning them of the approaching Japanese army. Lieutenant Ted Younan is one of the Flying Tigers, volunteer fighters protecting China from aerial attacks. After rescuing Ted from his downed plane, Genie’s father asks the flyboy to get his daughter across the mountains so she can escape to the United States.

An epic novel exposing the ugliness of war and the beauty of hope. The city of Kiev was bombed in Hitler's blitzkrieg across the Soviet Union, but the constant siege was only the beginning for her citizens. In this sweeping historical saga, Kelli Stuart takes the listener on a captivating journey into the little-known history of Ukraine's tragedies through the eyes of four compelling characters who experience the same story from different perspectives.

In a quiet corner of northern Edwardian England, Margaret Lounsbury diligently works in her grandmother's millinery shop, making hats and caring for her young sister. Several years earlier, a terrible event shattered their idyllic family life and their future prospects. Maggie is resilient and will do what she must to protect her sister Violet. Still, the loss of her parents weighs heavily on her heart as she begins to wonder if what happened that day on the lake...might not have been an accident.

It is Warsaw, 1939, and Elzunia is an indulged teenager who longs for a heroic life filled with romance. But the outbreak of war shatters all her dreams. As bombs fall, she meets Adam, a taciturn airman whose fate becomes entwined with hers. In despair over the occupation, Adam joins the Polish resistance, then flies bombers for the RAF.

1943: the world is at war, and the villagers of Tyneham are being asked to make one more sacrifice: to give their homes over to the British army. But on the eve of their departure, a terrible act will cause three of them to disappear forever. 2018: Melissa had hoped a break on the coast of Dorset would rekindle her stagnant relationship, but despite the idyllic scenery, it’s pushing her and Liam to the brink.

When sixteen-year-old Sally is evacuated to the English south coast, she is terrified by what lies ahead of her. All she knows are the sights and sounds of London's East End – but Sally swallows her tears as they leave the familiar landmarks behind, knowing that she has to be a Grown-Up Girl and play mother to her six-year-old brother Ernie. Playing mother is nothing new for Sally – their real mother Florrie, a good-time girl, hasn't even come to the station to wave them off and Ernie, crippled at an early age by polio, is used to depending on his older sister.

Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.

Gracie Thompson has a job, a loving family, a twin brother who drives her insane and a great friend. A chance meeting introduces her to the love of her life. But the storm clouds are gathering, Europe is teetering on the verge of war and threatening to destroy everything Gracie holds dear. When war arrives her family are split up, her younger siblings evacuated, her brothers join up to serve, her boyfriend, Charlie, is in daily danger and her life is threatened.

It's not just a thousand miles that separates Hanna Majewski from her younger sister, Stefa. There is another gulf—between the traditional Jewish ways that Hanna chose to leave behind in Warsaw, and her new, independent life in London. But as autumn of 1940 draws near, Germany begins a savage aerial bombing campaign in England, killing and displacing tens of thousands. Hanna, who narrowly escapes death, is recruited as a spy in an undercover operation that sends her back to her war-torn homeland.

Vienna 1938: Austria’s leading couturier, Christina Lehmann, sits at the pinnacle of Viennese society. Her lover, the renowned painter Max Hauser, is at the height of his career. But Max harbors a secret, and it is only a matter of time before the Gestapo finds out. The situation takes a dramatic turn on Kristallnacht, when the pogrom against the Austrian Jews escalates and one of Christina’s Jewish seamstresses is brutally murdered.

Set in 1949 Paris, Slim Moran runs the Pitchipoi Agency with her Nazi Hunter boyfriend, Daniel. Their specialty: to find those lost in the last war. After a couple of easy cases, business has ground to halt, and Daniel has just gone on another manhunt this time to find the Nazi Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. Slim is bored until a British spymistress asks her to find a missing woman spy long presumed dead.

Germany 1939 – To save her baby, Trudi Beck must hand her over to strangers who will take her across the sea to a foreign country. Trudi has already lost her husband to the Nazis, her stepsons are taking the train too. Walking away from the train station with empty arms is the hardest thing she's ever done. London 1939 – Newly married, Sally Matthews, is alone again. Her husband is away training for war, leaving her days and home empty. She volunteers to help with the children from the Kindertransport, becoming captivated by five-year-old Tom and his baby sister, Liesel.

As the Nazis march toward Paris in 1940, American ballerina Lucie Girard buys her favorite English-language bookstore to allow the Jewish owners to escape. Lucie struggles to run Green Leaf Books due to oppressive German laws and harsh conditions, but she finds a way to aid the resistance by passing secret messages between the pages of her books.

New York, present day: On a whim, Juno Lambert buys a 1931 Underwood typewriter that once belonged to celebrated journalist Cordelia Capel. Within its case she discovers an unfinished novel, igniting a transatlantic journey to fill the gaps in the story of Cordelia and her sister and the secret that lies between them. Europe, 1936: Cordelia's socialite sister Irene marries a German industrialist who whisks her away to Berlin. Cordelia, feistier and more intellectual than Irene, gets a job at a newspaper in Paris, pursuing the journalism career she cherishes.

Paris, 1935. A dark shadow falls over Europe as Adolf Hitler's regime gains momentum, leaving the city of Paris on the brink of occupation. Young Madeleine Levy - granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish World War I hero - steps bravely into a new wave of resistance and becomes the guardian of lost children.

The rumblings of war in distant countries mattered little to Danny McClain. Growing up in Chicago, his world revolved around afterschool jobs, a rescued beagle, his pen pal in Holland, and the Cubs' chance to go to the World Series. Then, in December of 1941, news of the attack on Pearl Harbor hit much too close to home. In a few years, Danny found himself in the copilot seat of a B-17, stationed with the 390th Bomb Group in Framlingham, England.

For Stella Bled Lawrence, being wealthy and stylish in 1938 is exactly what it's cracked up to be. She's blissfully unaware of the rising tensions in Europe even as she travels to Vienna on the eve of the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Stella and her husband, Nicky, witness the night's atrocities firsthand. Even as they watch the horror, they never imagine it will touch them personally, a pair of wealthy Americans on their honeymoon, but touch them it does.