The biographer and journalist chooses her favourite works about women in war. Her latest book is “The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival”, which is published this week.
A Train in Winter
Caroline Moorehead, 2011
A hugely important book documenting female suffering during WWII and the solidarity that helped some of them survive in the most brutal conditions. The particular train refers to the Convoi des 31000, which left Paris in January 1943 with 230 French women resisters, sent to Auschwitz. Only 49 survived.
If This Is a Woman
Sarah Helm, 2015
Helm writes with uncompromising clarity and detail about a horrific, all-female camp established one hour outside Berlin. Nothing I have ever read has had a more chilling effect on me in understanding the Nazi contempt for human life.
Avenging Angels: Soviet Women Snipers on the Eastern Front
Lyuba Vinogradova, 2017
The Soviet Union employed more women in combat than any other nation before or since. The female soldiers Vinogradova writes about were mostly teenagers, with little or no experience of life, conscripted but still eager to play a role and often inspired by revenge for the killing of a brother or father.
The Women
Kristin Hannah, 2024
It was after reading this brilliantly researched and engaging novel that I decided I had to visit Vietnam. It’s not simply about the ravages of the Vietnam War, but about how the role of female veterans was erased by the establishment in subsequent years.
A Diary Without Dates
Enid Bagnold, 1918
She is best known for “National Velvet”, yet before she married, Bagnold was a journalist, and this novel – and a second, “The Happy Foreigner” – is based on her experiences as a nurse and ambulance driver in WWI. Although fiction, their interest lies chiefly in the realistic picture they paint of life for women eager to be part of the war effort.