GenevaBookClub: Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. n 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annexe” of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

GenevaBookClub: The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.

GenevaBookClub: A group of school boys desperate to join the German army at the outbreak of the First World War for a great adventure. Spured on by their school master. They discover the horrors of war all too soon. As in many war novels the character discovers on returning home on leave that the view of war of the people back home and the reality are far removed from one another and that he does not belong there any more. The novel gives a vivid account of the physical and mental horror of war. Wriiten in 1929 between the war it is an antiwar book and written at a time when the world was starting the descent into the Second World War.

GenevaBookClub: Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, thought to be the biggest-selling literary work in Israeli history, is an exploration of why his mother killed herself, and the effect on him, a sensitive, intelligent boy growing up in Jerusalem during the last years of the British mandate and the war of independence. It is one of the funniest, most tragic and most touching books I have ever read. I am a great admirer of Oz as a novelist, of his spare, quiet portraits of intimacy between couples, but here, in this long book, he reveals a huge talent for the big narrative picture, for Dickensian character portraits and an expert fusion of history and personal life.

GenevaBookClub: Khushwant Singh digs into the Partition of India with a deep local focus, providing a human dimension which brings to the event a sense of reality, horror, and believability. Summer of 1947: Partition does not mean much to the Sikhs and Muslims of Mano Majra, a village on the border of India and Pakistan. Then, a local money-lender is murdered, and suspicion falls upon Juggut Singh, the village gangster who is in love with a Muslim girl. When a train arrives, carrying the bodies of dead Sikhs, the village is transformed into a battlefield, and neither the magistrate nor the police are able to stem the rising tide of violence. Amidst conflicting loyalties, it is left to Juggut Singh to redeem himself and reclaim peace for his village. In a relatively short book, the reader gets to know a lot of characters in detail. Examination of the varied groups of people increases cultural and social understanding of that time and place & shows that the blame couldn't be placed on any one group.

GenevaBookClub: The novel takes place in late May 1937 during the second year of the Spanish Civil War." "This novel is told primarily through the thoughts and experiences of the protagonist, Robert Jordan. The character was inspired by Hemingway's own experiences in the Spanish Civil War as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Robert Jordan is an American in the International Brigades who travels to Spain to oppose the fascist forces of Francisco Franco.

GenevaBookClub: In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. No ammunition') to the landing at Algiers in 1943 ('I closed my eyes and faced the sun. I fell down a hatchway'). Filled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese.

GenevaBookClub: In 1936 George Orwell travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the fight against the Fascists. This famous account describes the war and Orwell’s own experiences. Introduction by Lionel Trilling.

GenevaBookClub: Published in 2015; set in 1970s Vietnam and Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen (born 1971) is a Vietnamese-American professor, the son of refugees from South Vietnam who fled to the US in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. A spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature and film. The story starts in April 1975 at the fall of Saigon. It follows soldiers in the defeated South Vietnamese army, who flee Vietnam to start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, a captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.

GenevaBookClub: Small town of Santo Stefano Belbo, in Piedmont, north-west Italy. The main character, known only by his nickname of Anguilla (Eel), has returned to his home town in the years immediately following the Second World War. He left twenty-five years earlier and had made his fortune in the United States. Returning to his home town, he finds many of the same smells and sights that filled his youth, but he also finds a town and its inhabitants that have been deeply changed by war and by the passage of time. “You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you”. The rhythm of rural life and of nature – inexorable despite human efforts The “recherche” of roots. The physical and moral destruction caused by the war (resistance civil war in Italy)

GenevaBookClub: The series follows the lives of two perceptive and intelligent girls, Elena (sometimes called “Lenù”) Greco and Raffaella (“Lila”) Cerullo, from childhood to adulthood and old age, as they try to create lives for themselves amidst the violent and conservative culture of their home – a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Italy. The novels are narrated by Elena Greco. “We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighbourhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two—I thought—understood one another.” Growing up in violent domestic and social environments The power, fierceness and violence of friendship Class conflict, the role of literature and the social responsibility of the writer amidst social upheaval.

GenevaBookClub: War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. A s Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.