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About the Book

In 1938, English spy Harry Taverner and Jewish photographer Anna Cantrell spend the night dancing at Berlin’s most elegant hotel. Anna is married to another man, the Nazi shadow is rising over Europe and neither expects to ever meet again.

But once peace is declared, they reunite in the ruins of Berlin, where Anna is searching for her missing children. With the blockade tightening and the Soviets set on conquest, Harry and Anna walk a treacherous line between love and duty, integrity and survival, loyalty and betrayal. And as the Cold War dawns, they are bound together by a secret that will only be revealed decades later, when Berlin finds itself on the cusp of another transformation…

Format: Hardcover (448 pages) Publisher: Corvus
Publication date: 1st August 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

S. W. Perry is the author of one of my favourite historical mystery series, the Jackdaw Mysteries, set in Elizabethan England. Now, in Berlin Duet, he has switched time and place to World War Two Europe with a story that left me equally enthralled.

For me, the book is not so much a duet as a concerto with Anna the soloist and Harry providing the essential accompaniment or taking over when she hesitates or doubts. Anna is a character who really leaps off the page. I loved her resilience and feistiness but also felt for her as she grapples with the challenges events throw at her. Harry is the epitome of a good man trying to do the right thing who comes to Anna’s rescue on more than one occasion.

The opening scene of the book in which Harry is surrounded by ghosts of the past is intensely moving. Realising that his memory is fading, he is determined to tell his daughter the story of Anna’s life and the events they witnessed together. Prompted by photographs taken by Anna, he describes how she was exposed to the magic of film through her father Rex who worked as a cameraman in Hollywood. It was he who gave her her first camera, a treasured Leica.

When her parents split up, Anna moves to Vienna with her wayward mother, Marion. Thanks to her mother she has an American passport but, less fortunately, Jewish blood. As the malign influence of Nazism spreads beyond Germany, Anna finds herself in a vulnerable position, married to a man, Ivo Wolff, who has become increasingly in thrall to Nazi ideology. Anna’s burgeoning career as a photojournalist brings her close to influential figures in the Nazi regime. However she struggles with the fact that in trying to capture truthfully the realities of war she is documenting the suffering of others, and possibly risking her photographs being used as Nazi propaganda. She finds comfort in the fact that her privileged access enables her to provide valuable intelligence to Britain. And of course there is the reassuring presence of the steadfast Harry.

But it turns out that privileged access doesn’t protect Anna from losing what is most precious to her, her two children by Ivo. And, even once the war is over, how do you find two people in a Europe that is in ruins and where hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced or disappeared?

It’s only in the final chapters that the whole picture is revealed and we learn just why it is so important to Harry to pass on the story to his daughter.

Berlin Duet is a dramatic story of wartime espionage with a moving love story at its heart.

I received a review copy courtesy of Corvus via NetGalley.

In three words: Powerful, tender, immersive
Try something similar: City of Spies by Mara Timon

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About the Author

S. W. Perry was a journalist and broadcaster before retraining as an airline pilot. He lives in Worcestershire with his wife.

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