Review: "The Berlin Letters" by Katherine Reay

The Berlin Letters by Katherine Reay
Published March 2024 via Harper Muse
★★★

1961: As the Berlin Wall goes up, Monica makes a wrenching choice—she passes her daughter over the barrier to her parents in West Berlin. Their lives will never be the same.

1989: Having moved to the US with her grandparents as a young child, Luisa has grown up knowing the power of secrets—enough so that she's a CIA codebreaker. But the discovery of a cache of letters turns everything she thought she knew about her past on its head and upsets her orderly life and sends her deep into the desperation of a crumbling East Berlin.

I've been more and more curious about life in East Berlin and the DDR more generally, and I absolutely flew through The Berlin Letters. There are two timelines here, and although initially I was far more invested in the 1961+ timeline, it didn't take long to get wrapped up in Luisa's story as well. As the plot goes on, Luisa gets more and more invested not just in what happened in the early days of the Cold War but in what is happening now, with the DDR teetering on the edge of collapse—and with crucial parts of her own story trapped behind the wall. I said above that I was initially more invested in the earlier timeline, but I didn't expect to sympathize so much with that section's narrator. Reay does skilful work in the gradual growth and learning of her characters.

The codebreaking aspect is fascinating, though I wished I better understood what the particular key in a given letter was—not sure if that will be clearer in hard copies of the book (I read an e-copy, and sometimes hard copies manage differences in color, formatting, etc., than e-copies do). I was also a bit sorry not to see...more urgency to Luisa's present-day work, maybe. Without giving too much away, I'll say that the codes she's breaking here have huge implications for the earlier timeline, but the implications for the later timeline are more abstract—enough so that, because we learn about them first in the later timeline, they don't hold quite as much suspense as they might otherwise.

All told, this makes me want to look for more of its ilk—accessible fiction about a time and place that I struggle to bring to life in my own imagination.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley. (I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)