7 Books Like “All the Light We Cannot See” You Need to Read

The unbelievable true story of World War II hero Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic track star who survived almost three years in Japanese POW camps.

Inspired by stories from the author’s father’s childhood, this is a devastating and deeply moving portrait of families in Germany who “went along with” Nazism at the end of WWII. 

Liesel Meminger is a 10-year-old girl in Germany during the war when her foster parents take in a Jewish man named Max. The subsequent story about the importance of the written word is powerful, to say the least. 

Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish heritage, planned to write a five-novel series. After finishing the first two, she was detained at Auschwitz and killed. Her work was published for the first time in 2004. 

One man’s act of mercy during WWII changed the lives of countless strangers, six of whom we meet in Von Booy’s compelling 2014 novel about interconnectedness and the effect of strangers on all of our lives. 

In Berlin at the height of the war, Sigrid is, by all outward appearances, the perfect German soldier’s wife. But beneath the surface, she dreams of her former Jewish lover and struggles to reconcile her husband’s work.

Lighter in tone than the other titles on this list, Benioff (who co-created Game of Thrones) tells the darkly comedic story of two young men coming of age in Leningrad during WWII.