Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1945
The books of 1945 were written in and out of catastrophe. The war in Europe ended in May. The war in the Pacific ended in August. What remained was the question that literature has been answering ever since: how do you account for what happened, and what does it mean for how we understand power, ideology, and the human capacity for both cruelty and resistance? Animal Farm appeared in the same month Germany surrendered. Brideshead Revisited mourned a world the war had destroyed. Black Boy named an American violence that the victory over fascism abroad had done nothing to touch. And in Sweden, a red-haired girl with superhuman strength and no parents arrived in children’s literature and refused, quietly and completely, to do what she was told. 1945 is not a year you browse. It is a year you reckon with.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 books · Fiction & Non-Fiction · Updated June 2026
Animal Farm
The animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human farmer and establish a republic of their own. The pigs, being the most intelligent, take charge of the administration. Within a year, the commandment that all animals are equal has acquired a qualification: some animals are more equal than others. Orwell wrote it in three months in 1943. It was rejected by four publishers, including Victor Gollancz and T.S. Eliot, before Secker and Warburg accepted it. It was published in August 1945, weeks after the end of the war in Europe, and sold out within days.
Ninety pages. Two hours. One of the most precise and lasting political fables ever written. Orwell had watched the Soviet Union betray everything socialism claimed to stand for, had watched the British left refuse to acknowledge it, and had decided that the only honest response was a book so clear that nobody could pretend not to understand it. The clarity is the argument. The ending — the moment when the animals look from pig to man and cannot tell the difference — is still shocking eighty years later, not because it is surprising but because it is exact.
Brideshead Revisited
Charles Ryder, a young Oxford student in the 1920s, falls in love with the Flyte family — with Sebastian first, then with Julia, and with Brideshead itself, the great Catholic house in the English countryside. The novel follows Charles across twenty years as he watches the family disintegrate and the house survive them all. Waugh wrote it in five months in 1944 while on wartime leave, convinced that the English country house was finished and that this was its elegy.
Waugh later called it his most ambitious and most flawed novel — written in a style of peculiar flamboyance that embarrassed him in retrospect. He was wrong about the embarrassment. The richness is the point. Brideshead is a novel about beauty and loss and the specifically Catholic problem of grace — of why the people who want salvation most seem to resist it most determinedly. The prose is unlike anything else Waugh wrote. Whether or not it is his best novel, it is the one that has lasted widest and the one that earns the label of masterpiece most fully.
Black Boy
Richard Wright grew up Black in the Jim Crow South — in Mississippi, in Memphis, in a world that enforced its hierarchies with hunger and violence and the constant, low-grade threat of annihilation. This memoir follows him from early childhood through his escape north to Chicago, a migration that was also an education in what America was and what it demanded of those it had decided to exclude. It became an immediate bestseller and a defining document of American racial experience.
Black Boy appeared in the same year that America celebrated its victory over fascism abroad, and the contrast was not lost on Wright or on his readers. The violence he describes is not historical accident — it is systematic, it is maintained deliberately, and it is not ended by victory in Europe. Wright understood that naming it precisely was a political act. This is one of the great American books of the twentieth century and it is read far less widely than it should be. If you have not read it, read it before anything else on this list.
Cannery Row
Cannery Row is a street in Monterey, California, running along the waterfront next to the sardine-canning factories. Steinbeck’s novel is about the people who live there — Doc, who runs the marine biological laboratory; Mack and the boys, who live in a converted fish-meal warehouse; Lee Chong, who runs the grocery; and Dora Flood, who runs the Bear Flag Restaurant. Nothing much happens and everything matters. It is the warmest book Steinbeck ever wrote.
Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row as a love letter to Ed Ricketts, his closest friend and the model for Doc, and the love in it is palpable on every page. After the grimness of The Grapes of Wrath, the lightness here feels earned rather than evasive. What the novel understands — about friendship, about the specific pleasure of people who have chosen to live outside respectability, about the way beauty and loss occupy the same space — is the thing you carry away from it. It is the book I return to most from this year.
The Pursuit of Love
Linda Radlett grows up in a large, chaotic English aristocratic family — the Radletts of Alconleigh — presided over by her eccentric uncle Matthew, who hunts his children across the countryside for sport and considers all foreigners suspect. The novel follows Linda’s pursuit of love across three disastrous marriages into the Second World War, narrated by her cousin Fanny with affection and rue in equal measure. Mitford based it closely on her own family, including her sister Jessica and the model for Uncle Matthew, her father Lord Redesdale.
This is the most purely pleasurable book of the year and the one that will make you laugh out loud in a room by yourself. Mitford’s comic gifts are extraordinary — she can make you find a man who hunts children charming, which is some kind of achievement — but the novel is not only comedy. The last third, as the war closes in and Linda’s last love is taken by it, arrives without warning and is completely devastating. The Pursuit of Love is a book that knows, underneath all its lightness, exactly what it is mourning.
Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking is nine years old, lives alone with a horse and a monkey, has superhuman strength, and does not attend school. She was invented by Astrid Lindgren for her daughter Karin during a period of illness, written down after Karin asked for the story repeatedly, and published in Sweden in 1945 after being rejected by one publisher. It became one of the most widely translated children’s books in history and one of the most subversive portraits of childhood freedom ever written.
Pippi matters because she is genuinely free in a way that no adult character in children’s literature was at the time — free of parents, free of school, free of the requirement to be grateful or well-behaved or small. She is not free by accident: Lindgren was deliberate about it. What Pippi represents — a child who does not accept the authority structures that adults impose on children, and who is happy rather than damaged — was radical in 1945 and remains, in its way, radical now. Including it alongside Animal Farm is not a category error. Both books are about the refusal to be governed by those who claim the right to govern you.
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Popper wrote this two-volume work in New Zealand during the war, as a response to what he saw as the philosophical roots of totalitarianism in Plato, Hegel, and Marx. His argument is that any system of thought that claims to know the direction of history — and that therefore licenses itself to force people toward a predetermined end — is the enemy of the open society, which rests on the willingness to be wrong and to correct mistakes through criticism rather than violence. It was published simultaneously with the end of the war it was written in response to.
Popper is a difficult writer but not a difficult thinker: his central ideas are clear and their implications are profound. The argument that the most dangerous political systems are those most certain of their own righteousness applies with the same force to the Soviet Union, to Nazism, and — as Popper did not fail to note — to the tradition of Western philosophy that produced both. The Open Society is one of those books that clarifies something you had felt but not articulated, and that stays as a framework for thinking about power for the rest of your reading life.
The Road to Serfdom
Published in Britain in 1944 and America in 1945, Hayek’s argument is that central economic planning — regardless of its intentions — inevitably leads to the erosion of political freedom. His target is not only Soviet communism but also the democratic socialism of the British Labour movement, and his central claim is that the mechanisms required to plan an economy require concentrations of power that cannot coexist with individual liberty. It became a bestseller in America and a founding text of modern libertarian thought.
Hayek is the most controversial figure on this list and The Road to Serfdom the most argued-about book. His critics — and there are many — point out that the social democracies he warned against did not become totalitarian states. His defenders argue that the argument remains structurally valid even if the specific predictions did not come true. Both are worth engaging with. Whatever you conclude about Hayek’s economics, the historical fact of the book’s 1945 appearance — published as the Soviet Union’s planned economy was being held up as a model by much of the Western left — is itself significant. Read it in conversation with Orwell and Popper and the year begins to make a different kind of sense.
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank received a diary for her thirteenth birthday in June 1942 and began writing in it two weeks later, after her family went into hiding in the sealed-off upper floors of a building in Amsterdam. She wrote for two years, until the family was discovered and deported in August 1944. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen in February or March 1945, three months before the German surrender. Her father, Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive, found her diaries after the liberation and arranged their publication in the Netherlands in 1947. The first Dutch edition appeared in 1947; the German and English editions followed in 1950 and 1952.
No book from this period has been read by more people, and the reading experience remains unlike almost anything else: the intimacy of a private voice, the specificity of a particular life, the knowledge from the first page of how it ends. What the diary gives you that history cannot is the texture of the ordinary — the arguments about food, the crushes, the boredom, the ambition — against which the horror becomes, paradoxically, more rather than less comprehensible. Anne Frank wanted to be a writer. This is her book. That it exists is one of the things worth being grateful for.
Not sure where to start?
If you have only read one book from 1945 and want to understand the year
→ Read Animal Farm. Ninety pages, two hours, and it remains the most exact account of how ideology betrays its own principles ever written in English.
If you have read Animal Farm and want the book that most changes how you see 1945
→ Read Black Boy. Richard Wright’s memoir makes the year’s politics personal and immediate in a way that no other book on this list can match.
If you want something that will make you laugh and break your heart in the same afternoon
→ Read The Pursuit of Love. Nancy Mitford’s novel is the most purely pleasurable thing on this list, and the grief underneath its comedy is real.
If you want to understand where the twentieth century’s political arguments came from
→ Read The Open Society and Its Enemies alongside The Road to Serfdom. Together they are the founding texts of the liberal response to totalitarianism, and reading them in the year they appeared makes them feel urgent in a way that reading them out of context does not.
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“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” — George Orwell, Animal Farm
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