Recommendations
Books Like Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Best books to read after Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
Louis de Bernières's Captain Corelli's Mandolin is the sweeping love story of wartime Cephalonia. These recommendations explore the Mediterranean WWII historical fiction tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the literary war romance that honors both love and loss in equal measure.
- 1Buy
The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
The Booker Prize WWII companion — a burn patient who may be a spy, an Italian villa in 1945, Ondaatje's lyrical multi-strand novel sharing Captain Corelli's interest in love across wartime boundaries and the wounds that war leaves on bodies and landscapes.
- 2Buy
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
The Pulitzer Prize WWII companion — a blind French girl and a German soldier, Doerr's dual-narrative novel sharing Captain Corelli's conviction that the human connections formed under occupation can be beautiful and meaningful even as they are impossible.
- 3Buy
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The British island occupation companion — a book club formed under German occupation, the epistolary novel that shares Captain Corelli's interest in what happens to ordinary island people under occupation and the unexpected bonds that form.
- 4Buy
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
The British WWII literary companion — Briony Tallis's false accusation and its consequences through Dunkirk, McEwan's novel sharing Captain Corelli's interest in the way love is destroyed by forces larger than individuals.
- 5Buy
Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky
The French occupation companion — Némirovsky's novel of the German invasion and occupation of France; darker and more rigorous than Captain Corelli and informed by Némirovsky's own experience as a Jewish woman in occupied France who died in Auschwitz before the novel was finished.
- 6Buy
The Bronze Horseman
by Paullina Simons
The Russian WWII romance companion — Tatiana and Alexander in the Siege of Leningrad, the most celebrated WWII romance epic since Captain Corelli in terms of scale, passion, and the weight of historical catastrophe on a love story.
- 7Buy
Birdsong
by Sebastian Faulks
The British WWI literary companion — Stephen Wraysford in the tunnels under the Somme, the other celebrated British literary war novel that shares Captain Corelli's interest in love before and during a catastrophic European war.
- 8Buy
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
The essential predecessor — Lieutenant Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in WWI Italy, Hemingway's novel of love and war that Captain Corelli is in dialogue with; the Italian setting, the impossible love, and the war's destruction of everything beautiful.
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