20th Century Stories Books in Order

The 20th Century Stories banner gathers Falconer’s novels set between the early 1900s and the end of World War Two. Instead of kings and conquerors, these books tend to follow nurses, journalists, spies and refugees whose lives are bent out of shape by revolutions and wars.

Anastasia opens the sequence in the early 1920s. A young American in Shanghai hauls a Russian refugee from the river and discovers that she looks uncannily like the Grand Duchess rumored to have survived the Romanov massacre. Their search for the truth takes them from the treaty ports of China to jazz age Berlin, London and Bolshevik Russia, and asks what it really means to reinvent yourself after your world has been destroyed.

In My Beautiful Spy the setting shifts to wartime Bucharest. A British agent posted to a city full of shifting alliances falls for Daniela, a Jewish woman who has attached herself to a German businessman in order to survive. As fascism tightens its grip on Romania, their relationship becomes both an escape and a liability, and Daniela is drawn into espionage that could cost her everything.

War Baby follows combat photographer Sean Ryan and his friend Hugh Webb across conflicts from Vietnam through later battlefields. Ryan walks out on a pregnant Vietnamese lover and lives with the consequences for decades, long after the war is over. The novel circles around guilt, friendship and the way one careless act in a war zone can echo into peacetime.

The duology Live For Me and Sleeping with the Enemy turns to Europe and the Middle East. Live For Me begins in a small Bavarian town in 1933, where Jewish teenager Netanel Rosenberg and non Jewish Marie Helder fall in love just as Nazism takes hold. His decision to stay, and her refusal to abandon him, bind them together through ghettos, camps and the machinery of the Holocaust. Sleeping with the Enemy continues the story from the Palestinian side of the struggle over the land that will become Israel, showing how personal loyalties and national identities clash as borders are redrawn.

Several books look at women remaking their lives in the upheavals of the century. The Unkillable Kitty O’Kane traces a Dublin girl from tenements to the Titanic, the suffrage movement in New York, the Russian Revolution and the Irish Civil War, watching her try to save the world while making peace with her own past. Loving Liberty Levine follows Russian Jewish immigrants in New York from 1913 through both world wars, as Sarah Levine raises her daughter Liberty, builds a fashion business and protects a secret that could shatter the family. The Good Daughter tells a different side of World War Two in the Pacific, with a hard drinking trader on a remote island forced into service as a coastwatcher when Japanese forces close in.

Though each novel stands alone, together they sketch a loose panorama of the “short” twentieth century – from the wreckage of empires after 1917, through fascism and world war, to the birth of new nations. Falconer writes these stories with the same pace as his ancient epics, but the weapons have changed and the questions are closer to home: who do you trust, what will you risk, and how do you live with what you have done.