"Berlin. 1963. The height of the Cold War. An early morning spy swap, not at the familiar setting for such exchanges, or at Checkpoint Charlie, where international visitors cross into the East, but at a more discreet border crossing, usually reserved for East German VIPs. The Communists are trading two American students caught helping people to escape over the wall and a lower level CIA operative. On the other side of the trade: Martin Keller, a physicist...

"With the rise of the Berlin Wall, twelve-year-old Gerta finds her family suddenly divided. She, her mother, and her brother Fritz live on the eastern side, controlled by the Soviets. Her father and middle brother, who had gone west in search of work, cannot return home. Gerta knows it is dangerous to watch the wall, to think forbidden thoughts of freedom, yet she can't help herself. She sees the East German soldiers with their guns trained on their...

In a Cold War spy story set in 1989 Berlin, an American woman married to an East German must confront the truth behind his mysterious disappearance when she discovers he was a spy reporting back to an East German counterintelligence officer known as the Matchmaker. Berlin, 1989. Protests across East Germany threaten the Iron Curtain and Communism is the ill man of Europe. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations...

"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...

"Sisters Vera and Marya were brought up as good Soviets: obedient despite hardships of poverty and tragedy, committed to communist ideals, and loyal to Stalin. Several years after fighting on the Eastern front, both women find themselves deep in the mire of conflicts shaping a new world order in 1947 Berlin. When Marya, an interpreter, gets entangled in Vera's cryptic web of deceit and betrayal, she must make desperate choices to survive - and protect...

"Millie (Meike) Mosbach and her brother, David, manage to escape to the States just before Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister in Berlin. Millie attends Bryn Mawr on a special scholarship for non-Aryan German girls and graduates to a magazine job in Philadelphia. David enlists in the army and is eventually posted to the top-secret Camp Ritchie in Maryland, which trains German-speaking men for intelligence work. Now they are both...

Late April, 1945. The war is over, yet Dr Doll, a loner and 'moderate pessimist', lives in constant fear. By night, he is haunted by nightmarish images of the bombsite in which he is trapped — he, and the rest of Germany. More than anything, he wishes to vanquish the demon of collective guilt, but he is unable to right any wrongs, especially in his position as mayor of a small town in north-east Germany that has been occupied by the Red Army....

In 1961 Berlin, twins Rudi, a photographer, and Peter, an actor, live in different sectors of a divided Berlin after the sudden divorce of their parents, where they are forced to choose between playing by the rules and taking their dreams underground.

In the days before the treacherous overnight raising of the Berlin Wall, teenaged cousins Drew, an American army brat in West Berlin, and Matthias, a young communist in East Berlin, become wary friends on opposite sides of the Cold War. Interspersed throughout the story are captioned photographs from the era.

Separated by time but united by sacrifice, four women experience love, loss, war, and hope from the rise of Nazism to the fall of the Berlin Wall as they embark on journeys of self-discovery and find themselves to be living testaments to the power of maternal love. Del autor del best seller La niña alemana nos llega esta conmovedora novela en la que cuatro generaciones de mujeres experimentan amores, pérdidas, guerras y esperanzas en una historia...