Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) book series in reading order

by Heather Morris

by Art Spiegelman

Elie Wiesel

47 books• 3 series

Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016), born Eliezer Wiesel in Romania, was an American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor. Night (1956), the first title in the catalogue, draws on Wiesel's imprisonment as a Jew at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel wrote 57 books, mainly in French and English, and the catalogue lists 47 books, including Dawn (1960), Day (1961), The Town Beyond the Wall (1962) and A Beggar in Jerusalem (1968). Filled with Fire and Light (2021) is the latest. The Holocaust, Judaism and Hasidism are recurring subjects.

Bodie & Brock Thoene write Christian historical fiction, with catalogue subjects covering the Bible, Jesus Christ, Jewish history, the Holocaust, the Second World War and the Israel-Arab War of 1948-1949. The joint catalogue holds 80 books listed between 1979 and 2026, and includes the Zion Chronicles, Zion Covenant, Zion Legacy, A.D. Chronicles, Elijah Chronicles, Galway Chronicles, Shiloh Legacy and Legends of the West sequences, plus non-fiction. Chuck Roberson shares the credit on the 1979 title The Fall Guy: 30 Years as the Duke's Double.

Primo Levi

24 books• 1 series

Primo Levi (1919-1987) was a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. If This Is a Man, published in 1947 and also titled Survival in Auschwitz, opens the catalogue and the Auschwitz Trilogy; The Reawakening (1963) follows. Levi wrote short story collections, essays and poems as well as memoir, including The Periodic Table (1975), The Monkey's Wrench (1978), Moments of Reprieve (1981) and The Search for Roots (1981). Auschwitz, the Second World War, imprisonment and survival are the subjects. Twenty-four titles are catalogued through 2016, at a median 182 pages.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) opens Heather Morris's catalogue of 7 books, which reaches The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse and The Wish in 2026. Morris writes historical and biographical fiction drawn from the Holocaust and the Second World War, with survivors, sisters and prisoners of the Japanese among the subjects. Cilka's Journey (2019), Three Sisters (2021) and Sisters Under the Rising Sun (2023) follow the debut. Morris, born in 1953, is a New Zealand author resident in Australia and still publishing.

Morris Gleitzman

52 books• 8 series

Morris Gleitzman is an Australian children's and young adult novelist. Two Weeks with the Queen (1990) drew attention to AIDS in children's fiction. Gleitzman co-wrote several series with Paul Jennings, among them Wicked!, which became an animated series in 2000, and he has collected three volumes of his newspaper columns for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald as books for adults. Earlier still, Gleitzman wrote for the Norman Gunston Show. The subject tags name the Second World War, Jews, stepfamilies and humorous stories, and the catalogue holds 52 titles ending with Always (2021).

Allan Zullo, born on 23 November 1947, is an American non-fiction writer who has written or co-written more than 120 paperbacks for adults and younger readers. Zullo produced the Hall of Shame sports books with Bruce Nash, the Ten True Tales series for children and the Haunted Kids books, and he wrote A Boomer's Guide to Grandparenting with his wife Kathryn. He also created the newspaper comic strip The Ghost Story Club, which ran from 1995 to 1998. Raised in Rockford, Illinois, Zullo took a journalism degree from Northern Illinois University in 1969; the catalogue lists 104 titles between 1987 and 2019.

Patrick Modiano

29 books• 2 series

Patrick Modiano is a French novelist, born Jean Patrick Modiano on 30 July 1945, and took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. Modiano writes autofiction, mixing autobiography with historical fiction, and returns repeatedly to the experience of the Second World War in France and its effect on identity, memory and loss. La Place de l'Étoile (1968) opens the catalogue, with Night Rounds and The Night Watch (1969), Ring Roads (1972), Villa Triste (1975) and Missing Person (1978) following; the Occupation Trilogy is the one series listed. The 29 catalogued titles reach Ballerina in 2025, at a median of 146 pages.

Jane Yolen

237 books• 22 series

Jane Yolen (Jane Hyatt Yolen, February 11, 1939 to June 11, 2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction and children's books. The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella, is the best-known Yolen work, and Owl Moon and The Emperor and the Kite are among the others. The short works Sister Emily's Lightship and Lost Girls both won Nebula Awards. The catalogue counts 237 books from The Witch Who Wasn't (1964) to Daddy Plays a Mean Guitar (2026). Series include Commander Toad, How Do Dinosaurs...?, Pit Dragons, the Young Merlin Trilogy, Books of the Great Alta and Tartan Magic. Yolen worked as an editor, collaborated most often with Adam Stemple, and in 2012 became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture.

Who HQ is the credit on 429 children's nonfiction biographies in the catalogue, published from 2002 to 2026. The run opens with Who Was Albert Einstein?, Who Was Amelia Earhart? and Who Was Ben Franklin? (all 2002) and reaches Who Is Vera Wang (2026). Subjects include biography, history and juvenile nonfiction for readers aged 8 to 12. Other names credited on some of the books include Megan Stine (7), John Hinderliter (7) and Nico Medina (4).

Three books make up Edith Eger's catalogue, all of them rooted in her survival of the Holocaust and her later career in psychology. Eger was born in Slovakia, practises in the United States, and specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder. The Choice (2017) opens the run, The Gift followed in 2020, and The Ballerina of Auschwitz arrived in 2024. Personal narrative, concentration camp testimony, suffering and happiness are the subjects across all three.

Joshua M. Greene has 16 catalogued books from 1981 to 2024. Subjects span Hindu mythology, including Krishna and Hanuman, the Holocaust and war crime trials at Dachau, and rock musicians. The list opens with Krishna, Master of All Mystics (1981) and includes Witness (2000), Justice at Dachau (2003), Here Comes the Sun (2006) and Gita Wisdom (2009). Girl Who Fought Back (2024) is the newest title. Greene also has a Children's Non-Fiction listing.

Jeremy Dronfield's 12 catalogued books span thrillers, history and biography, from The Locust Farm (1999) to Friedel and Gina (2026). Resurrecting Salvador and The Locust Farm both date from 1999, and The Alchemist's Apprentice from 2001. Later titles include Dr James Barry (2016) and The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz (2018). Subjects include Buchenwald, the Holocaust, prisoners of war and the Second World War.

Art Spiegelman, born Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman on 15 February 1948, is an American cartoonist, editor and advocate for comics. Maus is the graphic novel most associated with Spiegelman. Spiegelman co-edited the comics magazines Arcade and Raw, and spent ten years from 1992 as a contributing artist at The New Yorker. The catalogue holds 11 books, from Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) to JR & Art Spiegelman: The Ghosts of Ellis Island (2015), including Maus II (1991), In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Breakdowns (2008) and MetaMaus (2011). Subject headings cover the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors and their children, and comic books. Spiegelman is married to the designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of the writer Nadja Spiegelman.

Georgia Hunter has published two novels, eight years apart. We Were the Lucky Ones (2017) follows a Polish Jewish family through the Second World War and the Holocaust, and One Good Thing arrived in 2025. Jewish families, Holocaust survivors and wartime history are Hunter's subject. Both books sit in historical fiction, and Hunter's catalogue remains open.