Schindler's Ark

"Keneally’s Booker Prize-winning novel, based on the true story of Oskar Schindler—an entrepreneur and Nazi party member who saved the lives of more than 1200 Jews during the Second World War, in assisting their escape from Hitler’s Germany. Keneally was convinced to take on the project after meeting a Holocaust survivor in Los Angeles. As he later recalled : I met a Schindler survivor named Leopold Pfefferberg in his Beverly Hills luggage store in October 1980. Buying a briefcase to replace one which came unstuck, I was in there a long time while Mastercard investigated my bona fides… But Leopold had time to get talking, and ultimately led me out through the repair room, where Mischa, his wife, was working on orders, to a filing cabinet. It was full of Schindler material including testimonies of survivors, photographs of the period, documents, some of them produced by Oskar himself, copies of SS telegrams, and the famous list of Swangsarbeitslager Brinnlitz, Oskar’s second camp. The book was famously adapted into the Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg. For those who’d like to read more about the backstory to the book, and how it came to be, Keneally also wrote a memoir on the subject, Searching for Schindler . The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a doctor from Tasmania who, as an old man, flashes back to his time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, building the infamous Burma Railway. Read expert recommendations The best books on The Burma Railway Jacqueline Passman , Teacher 🏆 Winner of the 2013 Booker Prize This epic historical novel, set in a 19th-century New Zealand goldrush town, is ghost story, mystery, and extraordinarily ambitious work of literature in one. Successfully adapted into an acclaimed TV mini-series starring Eve Hewson and Eva Green in 2020. Read expert recommendations 🏆 Winner of the 2015 Booker Prize Marlon James's third novel tells the story of an attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1970s Jamaica and its chaotic aftermath, as CIA agents flooded in from overseas and violence flowed well beyond the island's shores. Michiko Kakutani, then of the New York Times, said it was "like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It’s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex." Read expert recommendations The Funniest Historical Novels Toby Clements , Journalist 🏆 Winner of the 2000 Booker Prize A brilliantly clever historical novel featuring two wealthy sisters from a fictional Ontario town, featuring a novel-within-a-novel-within-a-novel—or something like it. To enjoy it, one must allow the action to unfurl in all directions—back and forth in time, and refracted through the characters' metafictional counterparts—and simply trust that it will all come together in the end. Read expert recommendations 🏆 Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize Read expert recommendations The best books on India William Dalrymple , Travel Writer 🏆 Winner of the 1989 Booker Prize Read expert recommendations The best books on Enduring Love Riz Khan , Journalist 🏆 Winner of the 1980 Booker Prize Read expert recommendations The Best William Golding Books Judy Golding , Memoirist"