Over the years my reading habits have changed and I no longer reach for historical fiction as much since my brain can't seem to follow along with all of the variety of characters. I do no feel like I can give a fair review for this book because of this so I am just going to move it onto my "in the future when life slows down" tbr.

This is the best historical fiction book I’ve read this year! I was awake until the early morning hours finishing it, because I could not put it down! The story was heart-breaking, as Holocaust stories tend to be. The author did a wonderful job of transitioning between the time period of WW2 and the divided Berlin of the Cold War era. It held me riveted from the first page to the last.

I am a huge fan of WWII historical fiction. This book was also a dual timeline and added to my desire to read it. What an emotional journey you will take as you open the cover and get engrossed in the story of Liesse and Karen. The experiences Liesse has as she endures the horrors of WWII and the treatment Jews were subjected to were heartwrenching. As you travel with Karen during the present day, your heart will ache as she deals with the loss of her mother. And her misconceptions of her parents’ marriage and relationship will cause her such angst. The author does a great job of peeling back the layers of Liesse’s life and the impact Michael and Andrew have on her. The melding of the two time periods was touching and the emotional and mental trauma the two main characters endured had you reaching for the tissues. While I could judge Karen harshly for the way she handled things, especially the relationship with her father, I think he played a role in how she was affected by the loss and needed a father who could step beyond the loss he was experiencing and simply provide the comfort, love, and compassion she desperately needed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bookoutre for my advanced review copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

I was not able to get interested in this book and I did not finish it. The characters and the plot were not able to catch or keep my attention.

Another WWII easy-read women's fiction novel, primarily set in Nazi Germany, as Karen, in the 1990s.seeks to discover who her parents were during that horrific time. The main story line is good but it included unnecessary romantic strands, and the writing was too dense and overwrought at times.

This novel centers around a young girl who lost her mother at a very young age. While going through her mother's belongings, she discovered a mystery involving both of her parents. Intrigued she travels to Germany to discover who her parents were during the Nazi occupation of World War II.

I really wanted to love this book, but I was a little disappointed in the end. Why authors feel the need to create unnecessary romances between characters is something I will never understand. The main story line of this book is really great but the author lost me in the end. The romance between the main character and the man who helps her uncover her past was unnecessary and distracted the reader from the overall grayness of the book.

I received an advanced reader's copy of this book from #NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Not for me. I did a history degree and can struggle with fictionalised Nazis. In this case Goebbels at a fashion show seemed ridiculous and it annoyed me to the point where I just had to stop reading

A gripping WW2 story by Catherine Hokan begins with a daughter returning home to her estranged father who is deteriorating in health. As the book progresses we uncover the reason for the distance between them. Beset by the trauma of her mother drowning and her mother and father’s relationship, Karen starts to trawl through family documents and photos when clearing their family home and discovers a relationship built on secrets.

I came away from the novel more informed of the plight of the Jews in Berlin during the war whether practicing or not “family trees and diagrams of Aryan or Non- Aryan grandparents and parents which were now used to establish degrees of Jewishness”. The story moves through the atrocities of the concentration camps, those that survived, to the break up of the Berlin Wall. Shocking in parts but I can take that in a well-written novel.

Thanks to Netgalley the author and publishers Bookouture for an ARC in return for an honest review

What Only We Know made me crave more historical fiction! The author’s writing had me locked into the story early and throughout the entire book. You won’t be disappointed!

This book is fantastic. Poor Liese, I can’t even imagine the pain she went through and the journey that Karen took to understand her mother. This book is so well written.

I knew this book would be wonderful, having read this author’s previous book, but it exceeded my expectations. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and a very special book.

I really loved the dual timelines. I found Liese’s story so moving and so compelling. Then Karen tries to unravel the story, and it all begins to come together.

A lot of books set in this era focus on the English experience of the war. This is different. Here, we see what it was like for those in Germany who were hated simply because of their religion. Families like Liese’s, who were not even practicing Jews, and who lived a very comfortable life, were labelled, and everything they had was taken from them.

There are some truly sad, and even shocking, moments in this book, made even more poignant by the fact that these are based on reality.

I found the era that Karen is in very interesting too, as great changes are happening in the world, and Germany in particular.

A beautifully written, truly special book, which will stay with me for a long time.

★★★★ 4.5 stars

"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."

This story certainly isn't at all what I expected. It was so much more! Having read Catherine Hokin's historical debut with ,i>"The Fortunate Ones" which was incredibly beautiful as well as heartbreaking, I was eager to delve into WHAT ONLY WE KNOW. And believe me, it was just as beautiful and just as heartbreaking. A dual timeline novel the story, told two separate voices throughout, will consume you as if you had lived through it.

Hove, England, 1971: She steps into the water, the shingles crunching under her feet, until the ground becomes softer into sand and the ripples lap around her ankles. The sun would soon be up, floating on the horizon - it will be a beautiful day. But today, this is it. Her day has come. As she steps knee-deep...chest-deep...feet on tiptoes as the waves hug her shoulders pulling her deeper and deeper. Her eyelids drop. The seagulls fall silent. And there is nothing in her ears but the gurgle of Lottie's giggle. She has found her at last. Her parting thoughts are that he will read what she has written and will do what she asked. It was time.

Berlin 1936: Sixteen year old Leise Elfmann is the only child of Paul and Margarethe and heir to the Hause Elfmann fashion salon where the family design and make clothing for the wealthy women of Berlin and beyond. Their designs are highly sought after and their status is firmly entrenched within distinguished German social circles. But that all changes with the rising of the new National Socialist Party and their dogmatic leader, Hitler. For the Elfmanns are Jewish...albeit non-practising, but Jewish all the same.

Little by little, Jews were stripped of their status right down to the last piece of their dignity. They were unable to attend school, go to work, run a business, own a property...to being restricted to curfews, wearing yellow stars emblazoned on their clothing, living in the squalor of the ghetto before being "deported" which was just another word for sending them to death camps. Some survived, most did not. But those that did, were irrevocably changed by their hellish experiences.

Leise's parents refused to listen to her pleas and those of their closest friend Otto or his son Michael, and continued to operate their business as if the new rules did not apply to them. They were royalty in German society! They dressed the wealthiest people...including Nazi wives. They were completely safe from being singled out. Until they weren't. And then they lost everything.

By 1939 they were shuffled into a Jewish ghetto and Leise sent them out to work while she stayed at home and cared for her baby daughter, Lotte. When one day her parents returned home late with letters telling them to report the following day for deportation, Leise bid them goodbye as she left the ghetto with Michael who worked for the German resistance and organised a litany of safe houses for her and Lotte to stay in, moving on regularly so as to not raise suspicion as to her being a Jew. But one day when Michael was to take them to their final safe house in the country, he had failed to arrive. And in his place were Nazi soldiers who threw Leise and Lotte into a truck and then a train bound for Ravensbruck concentration camp.

And it was there that Leise's life changed forever.

Aldershot, England, 1978: Eighteen year old Karen Cartwright was devastated when her mother Elizabeth took her own life seven years ago when she was just 11. Since then, the gap between her and her father Andrew has grown wider and wider, as she has grown angrier and angrier at him for refusing to tell her anything about her mother or why she took her life. Growing up, Karen's mother was something of an enigma. She rarely spent any time with her daughter or did anything together as a family, claiming one of her headaches and then sleeping for days on end. She would often recall her father holding her mother in a way she thought was coercive and controlling and so she therefore blamed him for her death.

It is then she ponders as where her mother's jewellery box had gone to. It always sat on her bedside table, despite her mother never wearing anything that was in it. So Karen decided to search her father's room for it...and she found it, hidden on the top shelf right at the back of her father's wardrobe. Whilst reminiscing over the pieces locked away inside, the felt lining at the bottom came away, revealing just one of her mother's hidden secrets. Her mother's passport which held a different name and another document in German which appeared to be a marriage certificate dated 1947. She confronted her father with these documents but beyond confessing that her mother was German, her father refused to give her anything else.

So when her German class announced they were travelling to Berlin, Karen jump at the opportunity to see the city in which her mother once lived and hoped to find some answers there. But the Germany of 1978 was a different Germany to that during and after the war. Now the country was divided into East and West by a wall that now separated them...and never the twain shall meet. All she had was the address to a place her mother once worked as a seamstress and upon finding it, was to learn that her mother was actually Jewish...and from the East. It seems now she has more questions than answers. But still her father refused to give up her mother's secrets.

Eleven years later in 1989, Karen's father has suffered a massive heart attack and doctors advise that his best option would be assisted living. Her father, ever the organised military man that he was, had planned for such an occasion right down to his preferred care home. So while he was in hospital recuperating, Karen set to packing up the house he shared with her mother for 40 years. In doing so, she comes across a photo of her parents' wedding with a mysterious man standing behind them, a look of pure adoration in his eyes as he gazed upon her mother, and a postcard dated 1953 with an address for a man named Michael. Karen had no idea who this man was or how he was related to her mother but she had a piece of a puzzle she was determined to solve once and for all. She could not question her father, as the mere mention of her discovery sent him into all sorts of distress, so she was advised not to visit him. But she rang the hospital daily for reports on her father's progress despite her confused feelings for the man.

So with nothing but the photograph and the postcard's address, she sets off to Berlin, just as the East and the West are about to be reunified, to find out the answers she had been seeking for almost 20 years, determined to find them at last. But just as the Iron Curtain falls, so will the secrets of the past...and nothing will prepare Karen for what she is about to discover about her mother...or her father.

WOW! That is all I can say. WHAT ONLY WE KNOW is a story that takes you through a range of emotions from grief to anger to heartbreak to love and so much more. We are taken through dual timelines through the eyes of two women - Liese and Karen - whose stories are both painful and heartbreaking. The chapters alternate with the voices through each timeline.

Karen's story is told from 1971 through to 1990 in both England and Germany. From a young girl who lost her mother at a young age through to a confused woman at the age of 29, she feels she has nothing left to lose by digging into the past. Her father won't give her the answers to her questions so therefore she must seek them herself. But at what cost to others? I especially love the words given to Karen by the priest in the church where her parents were married and which I opened this review with that I feel says it perfectly:

"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."

But as the reader, we feel her pain. She never really knew her mother who always seemed just out of her reach...always unwell, always sad, always longing for something else. And after she died, her father stubbornly refuses to give her any answers or enlighten her as to who her mother really was. To Karen, she was an enigma. And that is incredibly sad. To have missed out on the love and warmth of a mother's love.

And there is Liese's story. Her's is the most difficult to imagine, let alone put into words. The utter devastation of her hellish experience could be felt within every word on every page that will have the reader reaching for the tissues as we cry along with the broken but stoic Liese. By the time she was 23, she had lost everything but her life...and even that she felt was not worth much. She may have survived the camp but she wanted to die. And she spent the next two and a half decades wanting to die. What was there to live for? By 1947, she had met and married British soldier Andrew Cartwright and moved to England to begin a new life...but how could she escape, let alone forget, the old one? My gosh, her story was at times brutal and difficult to read and I found myself in tears at the horror through which people like Liese had to endure at the hands of the Nazis. But although I have read many WW2 stories, including those of the Jew's plight in Germany and beyond, Liese's story is different and even more heartbreaking...if that is at all possible.

I cannot express how completely breathtaking WHAT ONLY WE KNOW is. You cannot help but be touched by Liese and Karen's stories...and you may find yourself bereft once they have gone.

I have just two complaints with the book. The first being that the beginning was slow and incredibly drawn out. I can see why it was included, but I felt it may have also sufficed as a backstory reminisced on and reiterated at a later time, possibly as war broke out. I felt at times like giving up it was that slow...but I'm glad I stuck it out and I urge you to do the same. I guarantee that it WILL be worth it. My other gripe is the loooong and drawn out chapters. Again, I can see why they were, as alternating between the two narratives, but I really loathe long chapters and I find that they only serve to make the story even more drawn out. Had the chapters been shorter, I'm sure my first issue would have been null and void as it wouldn't have seemed so drawn out to begin with. If that makes any sense. However, as I said, I am glad I did stick with it because the story really IS WORTH it.

If you love historical fiction sagas, particularly WW2 fiction, then you will love WHAT ONLY WE KNOW. It is heartwarming as well as heartbreaking as we delve into both Liese and Karen's stories and uncover their secrets.

"We were brought together by a place. Now we need different places. To find our stories in. To be remembered in."

I would like to thank #CatherineHokin, #NetGalley and #Bookouture for an ARC of #WhatOnlyWeKnow in exchange for an honest review.

All the feels! That is what this book is full of. I am reading lots of books in this genre currently and this is one that has stuck with me longer than most. Plenty of tears were shed over Katherine and her mom. I wish I had the words to express just what it meant to read these words. I can only say that you need to pick up this book and read it!!

I voluntarily reviewed a copy of this book provided by NetGalley.

I totally enjoyed reading this book. Couldn't put it down. Perfect read at the end of the day. Definitely recommend.

Book blurb...

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 thoughts…

PLOT
This plot was complex and well written.

PACE
A story line that was well paced. Kept me interested thorough the whole story.

LANDSCAPE
I had a vivid picture of the earlier times during the war in 1941 but not so much in current day.

CHARACTERS
All the characters spoke to me.

OVERALL FEELINGS ABOUT THE STORY
A well crafted story told using a dual timeline narrative. I enjoyed reading about the hardship Liese experienced during the years leading uptown and including the war. The camps setting/storyline was disturbingly real and played with my emotions. While the current-day story was strong, I enjoyed the 1941 time period more.

What Only we Know by Catherine Hokin is the story of Leise, a young German girl born into a Jewish family whose life was forever altered by World War 2. It is also the story of her daughter Karen, who struggles to understand her mother and the choices she made. It is also the story of her husband Andrew and the man she loved Michael. And, finally, it is the story of Berlin, And how the war and the wall changed it. I had never read a WW2 book based in Berlin before. The way that the Jews were pushed from their homes and lives was devastating. And their stories should not be forgotten. Follow Leise on her journey. Through the pain and the sorrow. But also through the joy and the laughter. You won’t be disappointed.
I offered my opinions freely. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this.

Historical fiction is my favourite genre, and What Only We Know definitely one of the best historical fiction novels I have read this year. It is set in dual timelines of the WW2 and the 1970s. There are two main characters in this book, Karen and Liese Elfmann. Liese is a young Jewish woman in Berlin, whose story starts in the 1930s just before the outbreak of WWII. Karen is a young English woman whose story is set much later in the 1970-1990s where she searches for the truth of what happened to her mother during the war. Who really is Karen's father and why did he not want to discuss the past? This book gave me an unexpected ending, but left me very satisfied. I was able to escape with this book, which is what everyone needs right now during this horrible pandemic.

Thank you Bookouture via NetGalley in exchange for an honest and fair review.

I love historians fiction if done well. I enjoyed this book but it did feel like something was missing from it.

Definitely a book that is worth the read though and a reread is imminent

Fantastic and rather different WW2 book--heartbreaking but not in the usual way. I love discovering new aspects to WW2 and all the stories it contains.

Absolutely marvellous! Can I give a rating higher than 5 stars?!
What Only We Know is an emotional story of love and loss, hope, courage and survival throughout the Second World War, but a story which has a far-reaching impact years later. What made this book stand out from other WW2/Holocaust-themed historical fiction novels, was the focus on mental health - something which would never have been recognised or discussed all those years ago. But to readers of this story now in 2020, it is obvious that Leise is suffering from depression, even Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and to acknowledge this would no longer be considered a taboo subject.

The author has clearly well-researched the history and politics of Berlin and she has then successfully penned a novel that I would highly recommend without any hesitation. It is the first time I have read any of Catherine Hokin’s work and I would happily read other novels of hers.

I really loved this book - the characters are wonderfully depicted, the pace is good and the story flows really well between the different timelines and narratives. Definitely a book I didn’t want to put down!

I am grateful to the publisher, Bookouture, via NetGalley for a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.