In this gripping novel, “The Berlin Letters,” set during the Cold War, author Katherine Reay presents two narratives and two timelines, as main character Luisa, a CIA code breaker, learns about a group of letters, referred to as the ‘Berlin letters.’ When she’s asked to help decode one, she realizes that it’s similar to a letter she saw her grandfather receive when she was a child. Her grandparents brought their daughter Alice and Luisa from Berlin to the US after the Berlin Wall went up. They won’t talk much about life in Germany, and Luisa knows that there are secrets they don’t share with her.

We learn about the events in the story through the first person narration by both Luisa and Haris, the father she thought had died with her mother in a car accident when she was three. Luisa had lived in East Berlin with her parents. She and her mother Monica were on their way to meet Monica’s parents, who had moved to the American sector of Berlin, on the day the wall was being erected between East and West Berlin. On the spur of the moment, Monica hands Luisa over the barbed wire to her father. She is stopped before she herself can make it over the barbed wire, so she is stuck in East Berlin with her husband, while their daughter is free in West Berlin.

To make Luisa’s life easier after the grandparents move with Alice and Luisa to America, Haris wants Walther, Luisa’s grandfather, to tell her that her that both her parents were dead. And until Luisa finds hidden letters from her father to her grandfather, written in code, she has no idea her father is still alive. Her much beloved grandfather died recently, and Luisa has moved in with her grandmother. Luisa realizes that there is much she doesn’t know about her grandparents’ lives in spite of their insistence on honesty her whole life. There are secrets that they have kept their whole lives, and those secrets make it difficult to completely understand the hows and whys of some of their behaviors.

From a young age, Luisa’s grandfather taught her to solve puzzles and decode ciphers. She’s good at it, and while she wanted to be a CIA agent, it turned out that she was shuffled into different divisions doing desk jobs without being told why. That failure devastated her. We are really invested in the narrative from the start, and we want to find out what secrets Luisa will uncover, whether she’ll find her father, and if she’ll learn the truth about her whole life.

One of the things that Reay does extremely well is to share the fear, the paranoia, of living in a communist country where spying on neighbors isn’t just encouraged, it’s forced. Residents don’t know who is a friend and who is spying for the local police. While Haris began life as a young boy who appreciated how the new communist German (Russian) government cared for him and sent him to school and picked out his job, he has come to realize that their way of life is not a shining example of anything. Instead, it’s depressing, with no hope of a better future. His job as a journalist consists of writing fluff pieces that are devoid of any real information and only serve to bolster the German government.

This novel has much to commend it. In addition to being a spy story and a commentary on historical events that might not be familiar to many of us, there’s also a soupçon of romance. The writing is such that we are hooked from the start. We really like Luisa, and it’s hard to put the book down because we feel invested in her story. We want to know what she finds out about the letters and her family.

Also, this historical fiction is set in a time period that is often overlooked, post-war Germany, during the life of the Berlin Wall. Reading this certainly opens our eyes to the stultifying life that those living behind the Iron Curtain faced. One of the many touching moments in the novel is when Haris marvels that Luisa was able to decide—on her own—that she wanted to attend college. She picked the college and her career. No government official forced her to do anything. He’s amazed by that.

Reay depicts the dangers of an authoritarian government and how only those at the top are rewarded. Only those at the top, and their friends and relatives, garner the power and money and luxury. Everyone else is watched, spied on, threatened, and forced to work at whatever they are told to do. The politicians and the KGB and its ilk have it all; the common man has nothing. It’s a beautiful story with a perfect ending, the fall of the wall. But it should also serve as a cautionary tale.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.