S. W. Perry, Berlin Duet (Corvus 2024)
WWII has a devastating effect on two families, leaving pain and unspoken secrets
1938 English spy Harry Taverner spends the night dancing with a married woman, Jewish photographer Anna Cantrell. He is her case officer. Love doesn’t enter the picture; there is a war on.
1942 Anna is hiding from her Austrian Nazi husband. Harry wants her to come in from the cold and escape with her recovering cocaine-addict mother and her two children.
After the war they reunite. Anna is searching the ruins of Berlin for her missing children.
1989 The elderly Harry witnesses the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he ‘has a turn’. His daughter Elly comes to look after him. In a lucid moment, he looks at one of Anna’s old photographs. He and Anna are bound together by a secret. ‘It’s time you knew,’ he says to Elly.
Anna and her parents are artists, but her life is haunted by the toxicity of their relationship. And she enters into another one herself with Ivo. The couple lives with Marion, witnessing her dysfunction.
The narrative jumps around in time from chapter to chapter, which serves to open up to us, bit by bit, building to a crescendo, the pain in people’s pasts. The night Anna ‘finds out’ about her father Rex, forced to see things by a drunken Marion, is burned into her heart.
As Hitler goes from bad to worse, we feel the fear. The conflict between Ivo’s Naziism and Anna’s Jewishness heats up. The rift logs one injury, then another. The ways in which the Nazi terror plays out within Anna’s family are horrifying. We see it through Anna’s eyes, then Elly, hearing the story.
It is beautifully written, encapsulating the most painful of human emotions and the devastating effect world events can have on families. I’ve read many novels about families torn apart by WWII and fascism. This one is something special.
This review appeared first in Historical Novels Review.
Susie Helme 
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