Fiction

The Martian by Andy Weir is a hard science fiction novel about one man being stranded on Mars and trying not to die. It features such riveting activities as growing potatoes using your own faeces as part of the soil and repair work on multiple pieces of equipment.Mark Watney was part of a six-person crew that constituted the third manned expedition to Mars. The mission was to remain on the Red Planet for thirty-one days, but six days into their stay, a huge dust storm blew up with ferocious winds that forced the crew to abandon the mission.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was a really clever gradual unfolding of friendship and the suffering undergone by the captive population of Guernsey during the occupation of the Third Reich during the early 1940's.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn reads as a fascinating piece of historical fiction torn between the events of World War I and post-World War II France. Despite a few criticisms, it's quite a page-turning gem that illuminates the unfortunate German-occupied France time periods with real and historical characters brought to life in a believable fashion. If anyone has read Kristin Hannah's 'The Nightingale,' they will enjoy this book, and vice versa.

Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List (or Schindler's Ark) is an account of how the Nazi member and industrialist Oskar Schindler rescued over a thousand Jews from very probable death from at Auschwitz, by protecting them as workers at his enamel ware factory. Thomas Keneally won the Man Booker Prize for Schindler's List in 1982.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand set during WWII in the South Pacific and Japanese prison camps follows Louie’s struggles through the POW camps. This book is one of the best non-fiction books about WWII ever written because it puts you in the POW camps with Louie and his comrades.