Birdsong

War and Peace Leo Tolstoy

Five Russian aristocratic families navigate the Napoleonic Wars, and Tolstoy uses their lives to argue about history, fate, and what any of us can actually know about why things happen.

Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak

A Russian doctor and poet is swept through revolution, civil war, and exile, sustained only by a love affair that the twentieth century conspires to destroy.

All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr

A blind French girl and a German soldier's paths converge in occupied France -- a Pulitzer-winning story of beauty amid war.

Code Name Verity Elizabeth Wein

A captured British spy in Nazi-occupied France is writing down everything she knows -- but what she is writing is not what she appears to be writing.

Suite Francaise Irene Nemirovsky

Two novellas about France under Nazi occupation -- written while Nemirovsky herself was in hiding, before she was deported and killed. The manuscript was not published for sixty years.