Monica Hesse Collection

Read all three masterworks of historical fiction from award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Monica Hesse.

In Girl in the Blue Coat, Hanneke navigates Amsterdam at the height of World War II, spending her days procuring and delivering sought-after black market goods to paying customers, her nights hiding the true nature of her work from her concerned parents, and every waking moment mourning her boyfriend, who was killed on the Dutch front lines when the Germans invaded. On a routine delivery, a client asks Hanneke for help. Expecting to hear that Mrs. Janssen wants meat or kerosene, Hanneke is shocked by the older woman’s frantic plea to find a person — a Jewish teenager Mrs. Janssen had been hiding, who has vanished without a trace. Beautifully written, intricately plotted, and meticulously researched, Girl in the Blue Coat is an extraordinary novel about bravery, grief, and love in impossible times.

In The War Outside, World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seems far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado — until they are uprooted to Crystal City, Texas, a “family internment camp,” all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan. With everything around them falling apart, Margot and Haruko find solace in their growing, secret friendship. But in a prison the government has deemed full of spies, can they trust anyone — even each other?

In They Went Left, eighteen-year-old Zofia Lederman has barely begun to heal from the horrors of the Holocaust. Three years ago, she and her younger brother, Abek, were the only members of their family to be sent to the right, away from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everyone else — her parents, her grandmother, radiant Aunt Maja — they went left. Zofia’s last words to her brother were a promise: Abek to Zofia, A to Z. When I find you again, we will fill our alphabet. Now her journey to fulfill that vow takes her through Poland and Germany, and into a displaced persons camp where everyone she meets is trying to piece together a future from a painful past. But the deeper Zofia digs, the more impossible her search seems. How can she find one boy in a sea of the missing? In the rubble of a broken continent, Zofia must delve into a mystery whose answers could break her — or help her rebuild her world.