On my first trip to Berlin I had the privilege of listening to stories of people who experienced the wall going up and the wall going down while sitting at a breakfast table. One of the transformative experiences of my young adulthood was when the wall collapsed. The woman we stayed with was my age, and the night the wall collapsed, she was pushed on top of the wall. Because the wall collapsing was one of the transformative experiences of my young adulthood (I was 16 when it fell), I could imagine her terror when she looked down and saw the East German military with their guns. In the Berlin Letters Katherine Reay has captured the essence of that experience in a page turner while transporting you to one of my favorite cities in the world. She has done so while creating characters that are real and match their time. It’s one of those rare novels that I wish I would have written, because it has that combination of immersive take you back to the history while also making it relevant today. I highly recommend this novel. But don’t take my word for why you should read the Berlin Letters.
Bestselling author Katherine Reay returns with an unforgettable tale of the Cold War and a CIA code breaker who risks everything to free her father from an East German prison.
From the time she was a young girl, Luisa Voekler has loved solving puzzles and cracking codes. Brilliant and logical, she’s expected to quickly climb the career ladder at the CIA. But while her coworkers have moved on to thrilling Cold War assignments—especially in the exhilarating era of the late 1980s—Luisa’s work remains stuck in the past decoding messages from World War II.
Journalist Haris Voekler grew up a proud East Berliner. But as his eyes open to the realities of postwar East Germany, he realizes that the Soviet promises of a better future are not coming to fruition. After the Berlin Wall goes up, Haris finds himself separated from his young daughter and all alone after his wife dies. There’s only one way to reach his family—by sending coded letters to his father-in-law who lives on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
When Luisa Voekler discovers a secret cache of letters written by the father she has long presumed dead, she learns the truth about her grandfather’s work, her father’s identity, and why she has never progressed in her career. With little more than a rudimentary plan and hope, she journeys to Berlin and risks everything to free her father and get him out of East Berlin alive.
As Luisa and Haris take turns telling their stories, events speed toward one of the twentieth century’s most dramatic moments—the fall of the Berlin Wall and that night’s promise of freedom, truth, and reconciliation for those who lived, for twenty-eight years, behind the bleak shadow of the Iron Curtain’s most iconic symbol.
AUTHOR BIO
Katherine Reay is a national bestselling and award-winning author who has enjoyed a lifelong affair with books. She publishes both fiction and nonfiction, holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University, and currently lives outside Chicago, Illinois, with her husband and three children. You can meet her at katherinereay.com. You can follow Katherine here: X: @Katherine_Reay and Instagram: @katherinereay