Recommendations
Books Like The Nightingale
What to read after The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
If The Nightingale's portrait of two French sisters in occupied France — the sacrifice of the resistance, the survival of the family under occupation, the retrospective frame decades later — left you wanting more WWII fiction that centers women's experience, these are the novels readers find next.
- 1Buy
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
A blind French girl and a German orphan move toward each other through WWII. Doerr's Pulitzer-winning novel is the literary fiction counterpart to The Nightingale: the same period, the same French setting, the same focus on what ordinary people do in extraordinary circumstances — written at a higher literary pitch.
- 2Buy
The Great Alone
by Kristin Hannah
A damaged Vietnam veteran moves his family to a remote corner of Alaska, and what begins as a wilderness survival story becomes something darker and more domestic. Hannah's own most atmospheric novel — readers who finish The Nightingale wanting more Hannah generally go here.
- 3Buy
Firefly Lane
by Kristin Hannah
Two best friends from age 14 through the 2000s — a friendship that spans four decades of American history. Hannah's most popular contemporary novel (before The Nightingale) and the place to go for more of her domestic realism without a WWII setting.
- 4Buy
Beneath a Scarlet Sky
by Mark Sullivan
Based on the true story of Pino Lella, an Italian teenager who helped smuggle Jewish refugees over the Alps before being forced to spy on a German general. The same combination of historical WWII heroism and love story as The Nightingale, in an Italian rather than French setting.
- 5Buy
The Alice Network
by Kate Quinn
A young American woman in post-WWI France helps a British spy uncover a network of German agents — told alongside the story of the female spy network that preceded it in WWI. Quinn writes historical fiction about women in wartime with the same combination of romance and resistance as Hannah.
- 6Buy
Orphan Train
by Christina Baker Kline
A 91-year-old woman in Maine and a teenager in foster care discover a shared history — the orphan trains that transported hundreds of thousands of children from New York to Midwestern homes from 1854 to 1929. A different historical period but the same emotional movement: a secret from the past, an old woman's story, the parallel between past and present.
- 7Buy
The Women
by Kristin Hannah
Hannah's 2024 novel about a woman who enlists as an Army nurse in Vietnam — the female-led WWII novel she wrote decades later, expanded to a later war. The most direct follow-up to The Nightingale in Hannah's own catalog.
- 8Buy
Beautiful Ruins
by Jess Walter
A young Italian innkeeper in 1962 meets a beautiful American actress who may be dying, and the novel traces what becomes of everyone over the following decades in alternating timelines. A war-adjacent historical novel with the same generous emotional scope as The Nightingale.
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