Readers can’t get enough World War II fiction, and authors are happy to keep the books coming

What is with our love for historical fiction? Specifically World War II stories — and, come to think of it, tales from the Western Front.

You can’t throw a potato peel without hitting a new bestseller about the perils of Nazi Germany, and if you thought “The Nightingale,” “All the Light We Cannot See” or “Beneath a Scarlet Sky” could sate our appetite, well, you’d be wrong.

The books keep coming, and readers keep buying. Just look at recent bestsellers lists where “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” and “The Lost Girls of Paris” have been vying with E.L. James and A.J. Finn for the top spots.

“It’s a period of perennial fascination,” says Kate Quinn, author of “The Alice Network” and “The Huntress.” And part of that, she presumes, is the fact that the war had such a clearly defined villain. With the Nazis on one side, the battle between good and evil couldn’t be less ambiguous.

That black-hat/white-hat conflict has become catnip for writers, but it’s not easy to stand out in such a crowded field. What helps is finding some juicy bit of history that hasn’t yet been completely raked over by academics. We asked four authors with 2019 novels about how they found a fresh approach to this well-read territory.