The Berlin Letters ~ Review

The Berlin Letters

By Katherine Reay

Luisa Voekler is good at what she does - breaking codes that have been encrypted. While the rest of the code breakers in her secret CIA division have moved on to the Cold War, her work is during WW2 and will stay there for the foreseeable future, if not longer. But when a colleague reaches out for help, Luisa notices something from her own past. Something that could change everything she thought she knew about herself.  Worse, she begins to question what she knew about the grandparents who raised her.   

This book is told in an alternating fashion from Luisa's viewpoint and that of her father, Haris Voekler, a man she has long believed dead. We are given a glimpse into the nightmare that divided friends, families, and neighbors overnight when the Eastern sector was cut off from the Western. Overnight, lives were destroyed while the rest of the world did nothing. A handful of people wasn't worth risking another war over.

The Berlin Letters offers an interesting look at a world that many, myself included, know little about. This is an interesting bit of history that is often overlooked or just given a brief mention.  Enter into a world of spies, codes, and a war fought not with weapons but with policy, propaganda, and words. This book spans nearly 30 years (1961 - 1989), is set in Berlin and Washington, D.C., and covers nearly as many emotions as years.   

I was provided a complimentary copy of this book with no expectations but that I provide my honest opinion. All thoughts expressed are my own.

                                                                                                                                                                       About the Book:

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.

About the Author:

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.

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