Recommendations based on "Chez Max"

Now an Academy Award-winning Netflix film by Jane Campion, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst: Thomas Savage's acclaimed Western is "a pitch-perfect evocation of time and place" (Boston Globe) for fans of East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain.Set in the wide-open spaces of the American West, The Power of the Dog is a stunning story of domestic tyranny, brutal masculinity, and thrilling defiance from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in American literature. The novel tells the story of two brothers — one magnetic but cruel, the other gentle and quiet — and of the mother and son whose arrival on the brothers’ ranch shatters an already tenuous peace. From the novel’s startling first paragraph to its very last word, Thomas Savage’s voice — and the intense passion of his characters — holds readers in thrall."Gripping and powerful...A work of literary art." —Annie Proulx, from her afterword

Nothing can prepare you for Anthony Loyd's portrait of war. It is the story of the unspeakable terror and the visceral, ecstatic thrill of combat, and the lives and dreams laid to waste by the bloodiest conflict that Europe has witnessed since the Second World War.Born into a distinguished military family, Loyd was raised on the stories of his ancestors' exploits and grew up fascinated with war. Unsatisfied by a brief career in the British Army, he set out for the killing fields in Bosnia. It was there--in the midst of the roar of battle and the life-and-death struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims--that he would discover humanity at its worst and best. Profoundly shocking, poetic, and ultimately redemptive, this is an uncompromising look at the brutality of war and its terrifyingly seductive power.

The remarkably powerful and critically acclaimed novel that was chosen as A New York Times Notable Book of 1999 and shortlisted for The Booker PrizeThe Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950's. Eventually freed from the gulag in the 1970's, he finds he has no reason to return to the West-he has become Russian in everything but birth.Now, on the day of his 80th birthday, Russia has changed. Communism has evaporated. In the aftermath, information has come to light that Alex is still alive. This moving story weaves together the events of Alex's life, exploring this momentous day, his harrowing past in the camp and his life in the village. And it ends with his having to make a personal choice, perhaps for the first time in his life, and the climax is shattering.

In Vichy France, 1942, a group of men sit outside an office, waiting to be interviewed. The reason they have been pulled off the street and taken there is obvious enough. They are, for the most part, Jews. But how serious an offence this is, and how they are to suffer for it, is not clear, and they hope for the best. But as rumours pass between them of trains full of people locked from the outside and furnaces in Poland, and although they reassure themselves that nothing so monstrous could be true, their panic rises. Arthur Miller's claustrophobic play of how the inconceivable becomes allowed to pass, Incident at Vichy is one of the most indispensable, moving pieces of art about the Holocaust.

USA Today BestsellerCalled “a Russian Thorn Birds,” The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons is a sweeping saga of love and war that has been a monumental bestseller all over the world. The acclaimed author of Tully, Simons has written a stirring tale of devotion, passion, secrets, betray, and sacrifice. “A love story both tender and fierce” (Publishers Weekly )that “Recalls Dr. Zhivago” (People Magazine), The Bronze Horseman is rich and vivid historical fiction at its finest.The golden skies, the translucent twilight, the white nights, all hold the promise of youth, of love, of eternal renewal. The war has not yet touched this city of fallen grandeur, or the lives of two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha Metanova, who share a single room in a cramped apartment with their brother and parents. Their world is turned upside down when Hitler's armies attack Russia and begin their unstoppable blitz to Leningrad.Yet there is light in the darkness. Tatiana meets Alexander, a brave young officer in the Red Army. Strong and self-confident, yet guarding a mysterious and troubled past, he is drawn to Tatiana—and she to him. Starvation, desperation, and fear soon grip their city during the terrible winter of the merciless German siege. Tatiana and Alexander's impossible love threatens to tear the Metanova family apart and expose the dangerous secret Alexander so carefully protects—a secret as devastating as the war itself—as the lovers are swept up in the brutal tides that will change the world and their lives forever.

The Korean war rumbles in the background throughout this novel as a reporter is found murdered at the Bathurst Arms, squatters are evicted from a military camp and there are new developments in the three-year-old hunt for a missing teenager. And, in spite of all that's going on, Jill Francis, a local journalist, and DI Richard Thornhill find they can no longer resist their feelings for each other.

A companion novel to "Slaughterhouse 5", covering similar themes and drawing on the author's experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden. A black satire, it tells of an American spy in Germany who becomes confused by his own methods as he sends his coded messages by using pro-Nazi radio broadcasts.

Berlin, 1940. The city is paralysed by fear. But one man refuses to be scared. Otto, an ordinary German living in a shabby apartment block, tries to stay out of trouble under Nazi rule. But when he discovers his only son has been killed fighting at the front he's shocked into an extraordinary act of resistance, and starts to drop anonymous postcards attacking Hitler across the city. If caught, he will be executed. Soon this silent campaign comes to the attention of ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich, and a murderous game of cat-and-mouse begins. Whoever loses, pays with their life.

In Changi, the most notorious prisoner of war camp in Asia, only one man in fifteen had the strength, the luck and the cleverness to survive. Food was scarce and the conditions intolerable but there were ways to ease the suffering if you knew the right man. King was that man, but he had his price and in a camp notorious for cruelty, injustice and corruption, he was hated above all men.

Evelyn Waugh's masterful depiction of World War II, with an introduction by Martin StannardWaugh's own unhappy experience of being a soldier is superbly re-enacted in this story of Guy Crouchback, a Catholic and a gentleman, commissioned into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during the war years 1939-45. High comedy - in the company of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook or the denizens of Bellamy's Club - is only part of the shambles of Crouchback's war. When action comes in Crete and in Yugoslavia, he discovers not heroism, but humanity. Sword of Honour combines three volumes: Officers and Gentlemen, Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender, which were originally published separately. Extensively revised by Waugh, they were published as the one-volume Sword of Honour in 1965, in the form in which Waugh himself wished them to be read.'Marvellous ... one of the masterpieces of the century'John Banville, Irish Times