What Only We Know
by Catherine Hokin
A door slammed and the unmistakable sound of boots came crashing up the hall. Liese held her little daughter’s hand so tightly, the tiny fingers had turned purple. The SS officer’s hand was at Liese’s throat before she saw him move. ‘I can kill you easily, then I can kill your daughter.’ He relaxed his grip a little. ‘Or perhaps I could kill her first?’
England, forty years later. When Karen Cartwright is unexpectedly called home to nurse her ailing father, she goes with a heavy heart. The house she grew up in feels haunted by the memory of her father’s closely guarded secrets about her beautiful dressmaker mother Elizabeth’s tragic suicide years before.
As she packs up the house, Karen discovers an old photograph and a stranger’s tattered love letter to her mother postmarked from Germany after the war.
During her life, Karen struggled to understand her shy, fearful mother, but now she is realising there was so much more to Elizabeth than she knew. For one thing, her name wasn’t even Elizabeth, and her harrowing story begins long before Karen was born.
It’s 1941 in Berlin, and a young woman called Liese is being forced to wear a yellow star…
A beautiful and gripping wartime story about family secrets and impossible choices in the face of terrible hardship. Perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, We Were the Lucky Ones and The Alice Network.
My Rating:
Michael had a girlfriend, a cigarette-smoking redhead he slobbered over like she was carved out of candy.
I have one more piece of advice, if you can bear to hear it. When you dig up the past, do it gently. With a care for the living.
There wasn’t a sound from the adjoining room, or from the bed where Lottie lay spreadeagled like a starfish. There wasn’t a sound from the streets outside. The world was as silent as if it had stopped turning.
‘Everyone in the camp is dying. If you’re lucky, you get to do it under your own steam.’ The owner of the voice was too thin to claim a discernible age or a gender; only the filthy dress marked her out as a woman. ‘Come in – don’t be shy. Press yourself close and choose your poison: TB, cholera, dysentery – we’ve got the whole set.’
It was as if she had wandered into Hell while its demons were sated and napping after an orgy of violence. She felt the stillness like a pause: it was filled with tension, time suspended while the next madness took shape.
We were brought together by a place. Now we need different places. To find our stories in. To be remembered in.
My Review:
This was my first experience in reading this author and I was quickly absorbed and duly impressed with this epic saga. Catherine Hokin unwinds quite a shrewdly paced and riveting tale of a curiously enticing mystery bound in tragedy that spanned several timelines and countries with a host of maddeningly annoying yet compelling characters and several intriguing yet devastating storylines that squeezed my cold heart and maintained my rapt attention. Her thoughtful writing was breathtakingly descriptive and conjured sharp visuals and keenly observant insights that hit all the feels with her deeply perceptive and sneakily emotive arrangements of words.
I was turned inside out yet completely invested and unwilling to put my Kindle down while compelled to read late into the night until my eyes went on strike and closed on their own. All the dispirited threads were expertly and cunningly woven together in a manner I never saw coming and ended with a highly satisfying conclusion that left me feeling surprisingly buoyant despite all the prior turmoil. Ms. Hokin has a new fangirl.
This was my first experience in reading this author and I was quickly absorbed and duly impressed with this epic saga. Catherine Hokin unwinds quite a shrewdly paced and riveting tale of a curiously enticing mystery bound in tragedy that spanned several timelines and countries with a host of maddeningly annoying yet compelling characters and several intriguing yet devastating storylines that squeezed my cold heart and maintained my rapt attention. Her thoughtful writing was breathtakingly descriptive and conjured sharp visuals and keenly observant insights that hit all the feels with her deeply perceptive and sneakily emotive arrangements of words.
I was turned inside out yet completely invested and unwilling to put my Kindle down while compelled to read late into the night until my eyes went on strike and closed on their own. All the dispirited threads were expertly and cunningly woven together in a manner I never saw coming and ended with a highly satisfying conclusion that left me feeling surprisingly buoyant despite all the prior turmoil. Ms. Hokin has a new fangirl.
About The Author
Catherine Hokin is a Glasgow-based author writing both long and short fiction. Her short stories have been placed in competition (including first prize in the 2019 Fiction 500 Short Story Competition) and published by iScot, Writers Forum and Myslexia. She blogs on the 22nd of each month as part of The History Girls collective.
https://www.catherinehokin.com/
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https://www.catherinehokin.com/
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