Three novelists revisit family history, and find wartime tales resonating with our own age. Each delivers a stark warning.

Christopher de Vinck is the grandson of a Belgian major general who fought the Nazis. In his debut novel, Ashes (Harper Inspire, £8.99; Tablet price £8.09), he draws on biographical knowledge to tell of two women growing up in Brussels at the time of the German invasion. The book is a compelling act of ventriloquism, speaking of occupation and vicious anti-Semitism from the viewpoint of a teenage Belgian girl. De Vinck aims to “whisper words of hope in a world that seems, at the moment, so hopeless”.