Stephen Harding Books

Description /Buy link takes you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.

Stephen Harding is a journalist whose work has taken him to numerous combat zones all over the world. Harding writes historical fiction that is inspired by World War II.

The author was an infantryman in the Army. He uses the knowledge he gained regarding the use of weapons and common military tactics to write his books. Harding’s military career ended when an incident in an armored vehicle in Germany left him with serious injuries. That was in the 1970s.

He went back to school, undergoing training to become a journalist. Life after the army wasn’t that harsh to the author whose work as a civilian reporter took him to places like Bosnia, Israel, and Northern Ireland. Of all the horrible places he has visited and the unfortunate things he has seen, the author’s most harrowing experience came from his visit to Sarajevo.

Harding couldn’t help but compare Sarajevo to Heidelberg in Germany. But unlike Heidelberg, by the time the siege ended, Sarajevo was in ruins, having been thoroughly battered by the war. The atmosphere was tense and tragic as people went about burying the dead, all the while doing what they could to avoid the landmines.

The experience left a lasting impression on Harding. But he knows that, as a writer, his work benefited greatly from the terrible things he saw because he was able to vividly recreate the brutality and wanton destruction of war.

Stephen Harding has never understood the idea of sending journalists without military experience to cover military operations. He doesn’t believe that their reporting can be accurate and informative because they cannot possibly understand all the intricacies they are witnessing.

He believes that military reporting would benefit considerably from journalists that have served in the army because readers would receive accurate accounts from people that actually know what they are talking about. As far as his fiction writing is concerned, Harding spends a lot of time writing about WW II because he understands that conflict better than any other.

With each book he writes, the author’s objective is to find a smaller, lesser-known story to tell. He likes to focus on individuals or small groups of individuals because this allows him to tell intimate stories that can accurately bring his settings and plots to life.

He finds larger stories that span the entirety of the Second World War more difficult to write because it is impossible to ground readers, to put them in the midst of the fighting, to immerse them so thoroughly in the chaos that they can practically see and hear the sights and sounds of WW II.

Harding admits that it is difficult to find new stories from WW II to tell because the period has been explored in fiction on multiple occasions. Even when he finds the stories, securing the research material is hard because many of his subjects are not important figures. As such, people did not bother to chronicle their lives and adventures.

Harding understands that WW II stories will become more difficult to tell in the near future because all the WW II veterans will be dead. He believes that historians will become more important than ever because their papers and literary works will eventually become the only tangible record of the events of WW II.

Stephen Harding Books into Movies

StudioCanal plans to turn ‘The Last Battle’ into a live-action movie.

Best Stephen Harding Books

Harding is able to bring obscure WW II characters to life in his fiction because he spends a lot of time getting to know them by talking to all the people that knew them and reading any literature that was ever written about them, with some of the best books in his bibliography including:

Last Battle: 14 French prisoners are being held in an Austrian castle. Hitler is dead and his War Machine has crumbled. The fighting should be over. But Jack Lee and his men have to mount one more mission to free the French prisoners all the while hoping that they won’t be the last men killed in the fight against the Third Reich.

Castaway’s War: When a Japanese Torpedo decimates the USS Strong, Lieutenant Hugh Miller and some other survivors escape to a Japanese-occupied island. Now Miller must survive in the face of incredible odds.

When Does The Next Stephen Harding book come out?

Stephen Harding doesn't seem to have an upcoming book. Their newest book is The Castaway\'s War: One Man\'s Battle Against Imperial Japan and was released on May, 3rd 2016. It is the newest book in the Stephen Harding Non-Fiction Books.

Home » Author » Stephen Harding

BookSeries.org