Historical Archives - Alan Gratz

Captain America: The Ghost Army

Captain America and his sidekick Bucky Barnes are fighting the good fight against the Nazis in Eastern Europe alongside the United States Ghost Army—a real American unit from World War II made up of artists, actors, and sound engineers who use inflatable tanks, giant loudspeakers, fake radio transmissions, and other props and tricks to deceive the Axis powers. But the German army has a Ghost Army of its own–and theirs are the floating, undead, kill-you-with-a-death-touch kind of ghosts! How can Cap and his friends fight something that’s already dead?

Resist

Samira and her loyal dog Cyrano must rely on their courage and wits to avoid and outsmart the German forces at D-Day and save her mother in this exciting companion novella to Allies!

Ground Zero

Nine year old Brandon is trapped in the North Tower when an airplane slams into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Nearly twenty years later in Afghanistan, eleven year old Reshmina struggles to survive when the U.S. and the Taliban use her village as a battleground. But the past and present are tied together, and Brandon and Reshmina are connected in more ways than they know…

Allies

June 6, 1944. D-Day. Six disparate heroes–a French-Algerian resistance fighter, a Canadian paratrooper, a British tank driver, an African-American medic, a girl from Normandy, and an American soldier with a dangerous secret–put their lives on the line to make the Allied invasion of German-occupied France a success, proving that we are stronger together.

Grenade

The day the Americans land on Okinawa during World War II, the Japanese Army pulls Hideki Kaneshiro and all the other boys out of middle school and gives them each two grenades. One grenade, they tell Hideki, is to kill an American soldier.

The other grenade is to kill himself.

Refugee

A Jewish boy flees Nazi Germany for Cuba aboard the MS St. Louis in 1939. A Cuban girl escapes Cuba on a raft bound for America in 1994. A Syrian boy travels from Syria to Germany in the present day. Three different kids, all connected by one goal: ESCAPE.

Projekt 1065

World War II is raging. Michael O’Shaunessey, the son of the Irish ambassador to Nazi Germany, lives in war-torn Berlin with his parents. Like the other boys at his school, Michael is a member of the Hitler Youth. But Michael has a secret: He and his parents are spies.

Prisoner B-3087

10 different concentration camps. 10 different encounters with death. Can Yanek make it through the terror without losing his hope, his will to live, and, most of all, his identity?

Based on the astonishing true story of one extraordinary boy.

The Brooklyn Nine

From baseball’s beginnings in old New York through the Civil War, the birth of professional baseball, the women’s league of the 40s, the Cold War, and into the 2000s, The Brooklyn Nine follows nine generations of kids in one family as they experience the ups and downs of baseball and American history.

Samurai Shortstop

Tokyo, Japan. 1890. When his beloved Uncle Koji commits ritual suicide, 16-year-old Toyo Shimada must learn to blend bushido — the samurai way of the warrior — with his baseball practices to prevent his father from following in Koji’s footsteps, all while navigating his first year at the punishing First Higher School of Tokyo.

Historical Fiction by Alan Gratz