Beneath A Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan is a historical fiction bestseller. This novel is based upon the life of Penola, an Italian teenager who had an incredibly unique, fascinating, and heroic life during World War Two. He experienced mountain climber Pino who helped numerous families escape by crossing the Alps.
Then, in an attempt to keep Pino safe, his parents asked that he sign up as a Nazi soldier, but ultimately he became a spy. This book is about World War Two from the perspective of an Italian teenager. If you want to read like Beneath A Scarlet Sky, keep scrolling.
5 Books Like Beneath A Scarlet Sky (World War Fiction)
In the book Beneath A Scarlet Sky, the author says that he did interview Pino’s real life, but some stuff is added to flow the story. So it’s a fictionalized story based on a true story.
The biggest thing is that I’ve learned a lot about Italy’s going on during this time. If you want to know more about historical war fiction, then you are in the right place. I’m going to review 5 books similar to Beneath A Scarlet Sky. Let’s go!
1. Lilac Girls
The story’s premise follows three different women in different parts of the world during World War Two. We follow Kasia, a Polish woman who gets sent to rape Innsbruck, a concentration camp that tests women. They did like medical experiments. We follow Herta, one of the brave Innsbruck doctors who’s doing the testing. Then Caroline, a socialite in New York, and all of these stories somehow start to intertwine throughout this novel.
You will get immersed in these characters, these worlds, and their experiences. Like Beneath A Scarlet Sky, the author also does a good job jumping around from the different storylines. Towards the end, they all come interconnected, and you see the obvious connection between Herta and Kasia. But you don’t know how Caroline gets mixed into it.
These storylines are seamlessly woven into each other. Even though some are taking place in Europe, and some are taking place in New York. Each character’s perspective was given to see their point of view, especially with her. This is loosely based on a true story. Caroline and Herta were two real people.
Author: Martha Hall Kelly
Average Customer Review: (4.6 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Literary War Fiction, Women’s Fiction
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
2. Winter Garden
Like most of Kristen Hannah’s books, this centers around the story of women. This case follows a mother and her two children, now grown women. This family has not had the best relationship at all. Their mother is very cold and distant, and these sisters don’t have a good relationship with each other or their mother.
So when their father is on his deathbed, he asks his wife is dying wishes for his wife to tell the tale of the princess and the girl. After his death, and there’s a lot of other stuff going on, the mother tells this tale of this girl growing up in Russia and falling in love with a prince.
Nina and Meredith are her children, realize that maybe there’s more to this story than meets the eye, and it has connections to the siege of Leningrad during World War Two. So the author does a good job of seamlessly weaving in the fairy tale side to it with the present day. It was done very seamlessly. It’s a different perspective from a different side of the World War. The author does not sugarcoat anything, and it’s heartbreaking similar to Beneath A Scarlet Sky.
Author: Kristin Hannah
Average Customer Review: (4.6 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Family Life Fiction, Historical War
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
3. The Book Thief
It’s a story about Nazi Germany. The author wanted you to feel like death was telling you the story about a girl in Nazi Germany who started to steal books, and this story is stunning. A scene in this book brings me to tears because it’s a moment where Liesl, the main character, realizes that she hates Hitler. She says it to her father, and he slaps her because that is so dangerous to say in Nazi Germany.
Like Beneath A Scarlet Sky, there’s so poetic a story about this town in Nazi Germany about how they live their lives. They’re trying to stay alive, and they’re getting bombed because they’re in Germany. There’s this part where death says, Is this Nazi Germany? Halfway through the book, the author tells you what happens when the family takes in a Jewish guy hiding from the Nazis. Liesl and Max were going to have because this is a girl whose parents were taken away from her because they were communists.
So she’s forced to live with some foster parents who come to be her family. She does start to see them as family, but her story is so similar to Max’s, and he’s somebody who’s been persecuted because he’s a Jew and he’s hiding out. How they interact and how they talk to each other is very spectacular.
Author: Markus Zusak
Average Customer Review: (4.7 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Historical Fiction, World War II
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
4. Salt to the Sea
This book was the Goodreads 2016 choice winner for young adult fiction, and you can see why this is a historical fiction book about this historic shipwreck that happened during World War Two. A cruise ship was being repurposed to transport German refugees across the Baltic Sea right off the bat. This ship gets hit by Russian torpedoes and starts going down, but the thing about this is that this ship’s capacity was about fifteen hundred people. Also, it was carrying over 10000 refugees and soldiers.
So many people died on the ship, and a lot of times, it’s omitted from history. This ship has a lot to do with Germany and Russia. We’re seeing it told these four young people about the war through their eyes. A Latvian girl has been repatriated to be German because she knows it. The only way to survive is to become German, even though she misses her home and misses her country.
There are characters’ perspectives, so many girls like her whose stories don’t get told. Even though it is a work of fiction, this one got told breathtakingly to me. There’s also this guy who’s been restoring art that the Nazis have been stealing, and he’d been fed lies. When he finally comes to his senses and realizes how bad the Nazi regime is, he steals this precious piece of art and then is on the run.
Then our final main character is this sociopathic sailor. Interestingly, his perspective is mostly told through him writing letters to this girl back home in his mind, and you get in his head and see how twisted he is because he is invested in the Nazi regime. That’s what is spectacular about this entire book: you are in their heads throughout all perspectives. You see the war through their eyes. Also, you will see it through these four different perspectives, as the book Beneath A Scarlet Sky.
Author: Ruta Sepetys
Average Customer Review: (4.7 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Military & Wars Historical Fiction
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
5. The Book of Lost Names
The novel is set in France during World War Two. It tells the story of a Jewish girl and her mother, who gets separated from her father. They’re forced to flee from Paris during the invasion of the Nazis only to find a temporary home for them in the southeast of France by the border of Switzerland.
In this town called Aurignon, they find welcoming, warm and generous French souls who are secretly fighting for the cause by sheltering fugitives and taking care of them. As a side note, the way that the daughter and mother managed to get there was at the request of the father to create false identity papers and fool the French and German police into believing they’re not Jews.
Eva, the protagonist of the story, finds more than a refuge in Aurignon. However, her mother is extremely antagonistic about it all. Eva finds a purpose in this town by asking a Catholic priest to use her hitherto undiscovered artistic talent to forge official documents, like identity papers.
It helps transport innocent lives of main children across the border to freedom in Switzerland. No matter how much her mom hates it because she feels she’s lost Eva and considers her act of working with Catholics as a betrayal of their religious faith. Eva feels a mounting urgency to do all she can to help the plight of her fellow Jews.
With the passage of time and impending doom, the Germans will finally capture these Resistance fighters. Together, Eva and Remy utilize ingenious ways to not only mass-produce forged documents, along with the stamps and every detail that makes it impeccable.
But they also think of a method to document the children’s real names on some random book that Eva picks up from the church library where they work, which happens to be 12th-century religious text. Also, they do this by using a code called the Fibonacci sequence to help preserve the identities that were then being wiped out.
So Eva and Remy would draw stars or dots over words picked out using the Fibonacci sequence to spell out the children’s real names they created fake identities for. That’s why that text itself gets called The Book of Lost Names and becomes a way for Remy and Eva to leave secret messages for each other, especially during such a dangerous time. The story has its unexpected twist, which can probably throw your average reader off. If you like Beneath A Scarlet Sky, you must read it.
Author: Kristin Harmel
Average Customer Review: (4.7 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: World War II Historical Fiction
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
More Historical War Fiction: 5 Books Alike The Alice Network
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