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Historical person
1882–1945
Franklin D. Roosevelt served as president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945, the only person elected to the office four times. His New Deal expanded federal action in response to the Great Depression, while his administration gradually supported the Allies before entering the Second World War after Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt led wartime mobilisation and diplomacy but also authorised the internment of Japanese Americans and maintained compromises on racial segregation. Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance include Roosevelt as a major historical presence in the approach to and conduct of the war.
Stephen R. Platt’s The Raider connects Franklin D. Roosevelt to Marine officer Evans Carlson, who reported directly to the president after observing Chinese Communist forces and later developed the Raider concept. Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile follows Churchill’s effort in 1940–41 to convince Roosevelt that Britain can survive long enough to justify deeper American support. Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age brings the Roosevelt White House into the Sanford family’s political and journalistic world as the United States enters the Second World War. Jeff Shaara’s To Wake the Giant dramatises Roosevelt’s attempt to restrain Japan through economic pressure without provoking war before Pearl Harbor. Vidal’s Washington D C shows the capital adapting to Roosevelt’s New Deal and the growing international crisis from 1937 onward.
Periods
Series
The Pacific War Series is a two-book sequence covering the transformation of the Pacific conflict from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Midway. To Wake the Giant follows diplomacy, Japanese planning, American intelligence failures and the sailors caught in the assault of 7 December 1941;…
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The Breaking Point series follows RAF fighter pilot Johnnie Shaux and mathematician-turned-military analyst Eleanor Rand, later Eleanor Shaux, through the successive years of the Second World War. Johnnie experiences the conflict from cockpits, airfields and operational units, while Eleanor works in headquarters where intelligence, logistics and strategy determine…
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The Century Trilogy follows five interconnected families from Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States from the years before the First World War to the collapse of Communist rule in Europe. Across three generations, miners, aristocrats, diplomats, political organisers, soldiers and journalists experience public events through marriages, rivalries…
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The After Dunkirk series follows the Littlefield family from the evacuation of 1940 through the final campaigns of the Second World War. Separated across occupied France, Britain, North Africa, Italy, Germany and the Pacific, the siblings serve as pilots, soldiers, intelligence officers, codebreakers and resistance operatives while their…
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The Assegai Sequence follows Leon Courtney and his daughter Saffron from British East Africa before the First World War through the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the early post-war struggle over colonial Kenya. The books combine family conflict, espionage and military history across Africa and…
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Gore Vidal’s seven-volume Narratives of Empire sequence follows the United States from the revolutionary generation to the Cold War, combining the lives of the fictional Schuyler, Sanford and Day families with presidents, senators, journalists and political operators. The novels treat public history as a contest over power, reputation…
All books in this series
Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
