Reading List

Authors Like Kristin Harmel

In The Book of Lost Names (2020), Eva Traube is a young Jewish woman who flees Paris for a small town in the Free Zone and ends up forging papers for Jewish children being smuggled out of France. The forgeries save the children and erase them at the same time, so she records their real names in code inside an old religious book. Sixty years later, in 2005, she reads in the New York Times that a collector in Germany has found that book. Harmel, born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1979, began with romantic comedies before turning to the Second World War with The Sweetness of Forgetting (2012) and The Room on Rue Amélie (2018). Readers come to her for one particular kind of story: a small, practical act of resistance carried out by a woman nobody was watching, and a present-day thread that brings it to light decades later. The writers below share that material — women in wartime, real history recovered from the edges of the record — and most of them share her plain, emotional storytelling.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · WWII fiction · Women's resistance · Dual timelines · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Kristin Harmel, start with Kristin Hannah: The Nightingale is the book most Harmel readers arrive from or go to next. For the same occupied France with a present-day secret attached, read Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key. Kate Quinn and Pam Jenoff bring more espionage, Ariel Lawhon builds her novels on real women, and Ruta Sepetys goes to the parts of the war almost nobody teaches.

10 authors like Kristin Harmel

01
WWII · French resistance · Closest match

Kristin Hannah

American · b. 1960 · Novelist

Hannah has written bestselling women's fiction since the 1990s. The Nightingale (2015) follows two sisters in occupied France: Vianne, a schoolteacher who ends up hiding Jewish children, and Isabelle, who joins the Resistance and leads downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees, a route modelled on Andrée de Jongh's real Comet line. It had sold more than 4.5 million copies by 2021. Her later novels include The Great Alone (2018), The Four Winds (2021) and The Women (2024), about an Army nurse in Vietnam.

The single closest match: same country, same war, and the same insistence that what the women did counted as war. Hannah writes on a bigger canvas and at greater length, following two lives across the whole occupation where Harmel tends to turn a novel on one act and the object it leaves behind. The emotional directness is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kristin Hannah →

02
Occupied Paris · Dual timeline

Tatiana de Rosnay

French · b. 1961 · Novelist

De Rosnay was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine to a French father and an English mother, and worked as a journalist in Paris before her novels found an international audience. Sarah's Key, her first novel written in English, was published in French in 2006 as Elle s'appelait Sarah and in English in 2007. It sets ten-year-old Sarah, arrested in the Vel d'Hiv roundup of July 1942 after locking her little brother in a cupboard, against an American journalist in Paris in 2002. It was filmed in 2010.

The book that set the pattern Harmel works in: a Jewish child in occupied France, a hidden object, and a woman in the present who cannot leave the story alone once she has found it. De Rosnay is harder on France's own part in the deportations, and the present-day half carries more of the weight. Read it straight after The Book of Lost Names.

— Lisanne
03
WWI and WWII · Espionage

Kate Quinn

American · b. 1981 · Novelist

Quinn, from Long Beach, California, began with novels of ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy before turning to the twentieth century. The Alice Network (2017) follows a female spy ring in occupied France during the First World War and its aftermath in 1947; The Rose Code (2021) follows three women codebreakers at Bletchley Park. The Diamond Eye (2022) and The Briar Club (2024) followed.

More plot machinery and more spycraft than Harmel, and the same commitment to women who did real wartime work and were then forgotten. Quinn's novels are longer and faster, with a thriller's pacing, but the heart of them is the same: friendship between women under pressure, and the cost of keeping a secret for decades.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kate Quinn →

04
WWII · SOE agents

Pam Jenoff

American · Novelist

Jenoff was born in Maryland, worked as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Army, and served at the U.S. Consulate in Kraków from 1994 to 1998; she now teaches law at Rutgers. The Kommandant's Girl (2007) was her first novel. The Lost Girls of Paris (2019) draws on Vera Atkins and the women she recruited and trained for Britain's Special Operations Executive.

Structurally the nearest thing to Harmel on this list: a woman after the war finds something she should not have — in The Lost Girls of Paris, a suitcase of photographs — and follows it back into the occupation. Jenoff's time in Poland gives her the geography of the Holocaust in close detail, and her tradecraft is more specific.

— Lisanne
05
Real women · Historical

Ariel Lawhon

American · Novelist

Lawhon, who lives outside Nashville, writes novels built on real people and unsolved questions: the Hindenburg disaster in Flight of Dreams (2016), the Anastasia claimant in I Was Anastasia (2018), and the Resistance leader Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020). The Frozen River (2023), about the eighteenth-century Maine midwife Martha Ballard, was a Good Morning America Book Club pick.

The same instinct as Harmel's — find the woman written thinly into the record and give her a full life — with a stronger documentary spine, because Lawhon's heroines are mostly real. Code Name Hélène is the obvious next read: the French Resistance again, told through a woman who actually led it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ariel Lawhon →

06
WWII · True stories

Martha Hall Kelly

American · Novelist

Kelly grew up in Massachusetts. Her first novel, Lilac Girls (2016), became a New York Times bestseller the week it came out. It is based on the Polish women at Ravensbrück who were used for medical experiments, known as the “Rabbits”, and the American philanthropist Caroline Ferriday, who brought survivors to the United States for treatment after the war. Lost Roses and Sunflower Sisters follow earlier women in the Ferriday family.

For Harmel readers who want the historical record in the foreground. Kelly's subject is harder — a camp, not a forger's room — but she handles it with the same care about what happened to whom, and like Harmel she braids several women's lives into one story about rescue and memory.

— Lisanne

Every book by Martha Hall Kelly →

07
WWII · Baltic · Young adult

Ruta Sepetys

American · b. 1967 · Novelist

Sepetys was born in Detroit; her father was a Lithuanian refugee who spent nine years in refugee camps before reaching the United States. Between Shades of Gray (2011) follows a Lithuanian girl deported to Siberia by Stalin's regime. Salt to the Sea (2016), about refugees boarding the Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945, won the Carnegie Medal in 2017.

If Harmel's appeal for you is forgotten history, Sepetys is the strongest name here. Her books are shelved as young adult and are tougher than most adult WWII fiction; like Harmel she builds a novel around a single overlooked event and lets ordinary people carry it.

— Lisanne
08
WWII · Family history

Georgia Hunter

American · Novelist

Hunter's novel is based on her own family: the character Addy Kurc is her real grandfather. We Were the Lucky Ones (2017) follows the Kurc family of Radom, Poland, scattered across several continents by the war, and was adapted as a Hulu series in 2024.

The nonfiction-adjacent end of this shelf. Hunter's novel is the true-story version of Harmel's material — separated families, false papers, a long hope of reunion — and it shows that stories like Eva's really happened to someone's grandparents.

— Lisanne
09
Dual timeline · Buried history

Lisa Wingate

American · b. 1965 · Novelist

Wingate was born in Germany in 1965 and raised in Oklahoma. Before We Were Yours (2017) is built on the real Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis, where Georgia Tann took children from poor families and sold them through fraudulent adoptions between the 1920s and 1950. It pairs Rill Foss, taken from a shantyboat in 1939, with a lawyer in the present who finds a link to her own family.

Not the Second World War, but exactly Harmel's shape: a hidden scandal from the past, a child whose name was taken from her, and a woman in the present who pulls on one thread until the whole story comes out. If the dual timeline is what you love, she is as close as anyone.

— Lisanne

Every book by Lisa Wingate →

10
WWII · Literary

Anthony Doerr

American · b. 1973 · Novelist · Pulitzer 2015

Doerr, born in Cleveland, Ohio, began with short stories, winning The Story Prize for Memory Wall (2010). All the Light We Cannot See (2014) brings a blind French girl and a German orphan trained to track radio signals together in Saint-Malo in 1944, in short chapters; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015. Cloud Cuckoo Land followed in 2021.

The literary end of the same shelf: occupied France again, and a small act of resistance, here a hidden radio. Doerr is slower and more written than Harmel, and less interested in the women's war, but he is the book to hand someone who says they do not read historical fiction.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anthony Doerr →

Where to start if you loved Kristin Harmel

If you want the closest match, read Kristin Hannah.

The Nightingale: two sisters, occupied France, and the escape line over the Pyrenees.

If you loved The Book of Lost Names, read Tatiana de Rosnay.

Sarah's Key: a Jewish child in 1942 Paris, and a woman in 2002 who finds her.

If you want more espionage, read Kate Quinn.

The Rose Code for Bletchley Park, The Alice Network for the First World War spy ring.

If you want the forgotten history, read Ruta Sepetys.

Salt to the Sea: shelved as young adult, and it will not spare you.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Kristin Harmel

Who should I read if I love Kristin Harmel?

Kristin Hannah first: The Nightingale covers the same ground, women in occupied France, and is the best-known novel of its kind. Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key has the same structure of a wartime secret uncovered decades later. Kate Quinn and Pam Jenoff add espionage, Ariel Lawhon and Martha Hall Kelly build their novels on real women, and Ruta Sepetys writes about episodes of the war that most readers have never heard of.

What books are like The Book of Lost Names?

Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key (2007) is the closest: a Jewish child in occupied France and a woman in the present who uncovers what happened. Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale (2015) has a heroine who hides Jewish children; Ariel Lawhon's Code Name Hélène (2020) follows the real Resistance leader Nancy Wake; and Pam Jenoff's The Lost Girls of Paris (2019) traces a group of women agents from a suitcase of photographs.

Is Kristin Harmel similar to Kristin Hannah?

Very, and readers often mix up the names. Both write emotionally direct novels about women in occupied France, and both are book-club staples. Hannah's The Nightingale is longer and more sweeping and follows two sisters across the whole occupation; Harmel's novels tend to turn on one practical act of resistance and a present-day thread that brings it to light.

Are there WWII novels based on true stories?

Several on this list. Georgia Hunter's We Were the Lucky Ones (2017) follows her own grandfather's family, the Kurcs of Radom. Martha Hall Kelly's Lilac Girls (2016) is based on the Polish women experimented on at Ravensbrück and Caroline Ferriday, who helped them afterwards. Ariel Lawhon's Code Name Hélène follows Nancy Wake, and Pam Jenoff's The Lost Girls of Paris draws on Vera Atkins and the women of the Special Operations Executive.

What WWII novels are good for teenagers who like Kristin Harmel?

Ruta Sepetys writes for young adults: Between Shades of Gray (2011) follows a Lithuanian family deported to Siberia, and Salt to the Sea (2016), about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, won the Carnegie Medal in 2017. Both are read just as widely by adults.

Which of these novels has a dual timeline like Harmel's?

Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key (1942 and 2002), Lisa Wingate's Before We Were Yours (1939 and the present), Pam Jenoff's The Lost Girls of Paris and Kate Quinn's The Alice Network (1915 and 1947) all move between a wartime story and a later one, as The Book of Lost Names does.

Footnotes

  1. Kristin Harmel — Wikipedia
  2. ‘The Book of Lost Names’ by Kristin Harmel: Remembering as Resistance — ZYZZYVA
  3. The Nightingale (Hannah novel) — Wikipedia
  4. Sarah's Key (novel) — Wikipedia
  5. Pam Jenoff — Wikipedia
  6. Salt to the Sea — Wikipedia
  7. We Were the Lucky Ones — Wikipedia
  8. Anthony Doerr — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

More from the shelf

Author guide

Every Kristin Harmel Book

All her novels, in order.

Authors like

Authors Like Kristin Hannah

Who to read after The Nightingale.

Authors like

Authors Like Ariel Lawhon

Who to read after Code Name Hélène.

Reading list

Books About Women in War

Fiction and history, chosen with care.

From the bookshelf

More writers worth your time.

If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.

Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations
Start Typing
Dummy Image

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!