This was a very moving and poignant book and one that will stay with me for a while. Very well written and it was easy to love the main characters and to feel their pain and suffering. Well deserved 5 stars.

Thank you Bookouture and Netgalley.

This is the story of two women- Liese and Karen. Liese was a member of a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin until the Nazis moved in during WWII. Karen is now a successful architect but she's never gotten over the death of her mother and feels distant from her father, who is now dying. She's known for years that there was something mysterious about her mother but her father wouldn't answer questions about the time before they were married. Karen decides she is going to search for those answers to find out who her mother really was..
The book's chapters alternates between the two women, Liese in the past and Karen in the present. While historical fiction isn't normally my chosen genre, this book moved me deeply. As I saw someone else describe it - "beautifully sad". It's a lot to absorb and there were times I had to stop reading to let my feelings "settle". I loved it!
Thanks to Catherine Hokin, Bookouture and NetGalley for the ARC@

I love historical fiction and this book did not disappoint! Full of family secrets and heartbreaking choices and the lifelong consequences of those choices. A great family drama.
Thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture for the copy.

Thanks to Netgalley and Bookouture for allowing me to read this Arc.
This is a story told between two timelines. During the holocaust in Germany and London at present.
Not my usual type of book but I was invested nearly from the beginning.
A definite tear jerker. One to make you think!!

In spite of there being many Holocaust novels lately, this one stands out for many reasons. Sensitive and well written, the Elfman's world was high fashion and they seem to ignore the many reasons to leave Nazi Germany. The outcome is all too familiar, and the family ends up in a Jewish ghetto after having lost everything. Daughter Liese's fate is horrific, but sensitively explored. Outstanding in its genre.

In 1930s Berlin, Liese's life at her parents' fashion house is thrown into turmoil as the Nazis start their process of eradicating the Jews. First their business then their lives are in danger.
In the 1970s and 80s, Karen Cartwright struggles to deal with the aftermath of her mother Elizabeth's suicide. I enjoyed the setting of Aldershot as it is very close to where I live!
Catherine Hokin's narrative so clearly evokes the two time periods she is describing. I found myself completely immersed in the settings and amongst the characters. I was incredibly frustrated, even angry, at Liese's parents for their constant disregard for their daughter. They are so wrapped up in each other, even as she desperately tries to save them from certain death.
Liese is a very likeable character and I felt devastated by her life story as it unfolds. Karen is more complex as she has the selfishness of childhood at the start of the book and gradually becomes aware of the nuances of her parents' relationship. She feels guilty and unloved as well as blaming her father for not preventing her mother's suicide.
What Only We Know is a clever title as it could refer to the survival guilt specific to survivors of the Holocaust, or it could be a reference to the secrets that Liese has kept since that time. It could mean the secret side of ourselves that we hide to protect ourselves and others from the truth.
This is not a pleasant book to read but it is a terribly wonderful. The atrocities committed by the Nazis must never be forgotten and their victims should be remembered. Some of the events in the book are shocking and harrowing: if we ever become complacent and immune to the horror then we provide the opportunity for evil to reappear.
I have read a few other WW2 fiction novels recently, but what makes this one different and unique is that it looks at the aftermath of the Holocaust and the personal difficulties faced by one survivor. This book also shows the effects of mental health struggles on other family members.
What Only We Know is an incredibly powerful book and I look forward to reading more by this author in the future.

Karen Cartwright is still grieving the loss of her Mother more than a decade on when she is called home to nurse her ailing Father. Since her Mother's death, their relationship has always been strained, he never speaks about her suicide, and Karen often wonders if it was her fault that she died.

Berlin 1941; Liese Elfmann, in a world of privilege and fashion, is forced from her family home into the ghetto, and made to wear a yellow star. Unfortunately it seems that even the wealthiest and most influential of Jews are subject to the Nazi regime.

1970's England; Elizabeth Cartwright is struggling to cope with her young daughter and English husband. She cannot forget her home country and the horrors that she left behind. Will she ever know if she did the right thing in leaving it all behind? Or should she have stayed behind and tried to make a new life in a country so changed by War.

When Karen finds a photograph of her Mother and Father on their wedding day, she notices a stranger in the background, and upon further investigation finds a love letter from a stranger to her Mother. Is it the man in the photograph? Could this be the real reason for her Mother's actions?

Karen isn't all that sure that she should go digging around in the past, particularly as her Father has been so reluctant to talk about it. But could she finally find the answers that she is looking for? Only time will tell.

What Only We Know is a beautifully written novel about making impossible choices in the worst of times, and how those choices continue to shape our future lives.

The story begins with Liese taking her own life. After this, there are two stories running alongside each other. One tells you what happened to Leise as a German Jew during WWII; the other tells the story of her daughter, Karen, trying to find out more about her mother so she can understand why her mother left her behind and experienced so much depression during her life. As such, it’s not a happy story however, the development of Karen‘s story does provide some hope. As she finds out more, her character starts to soften and her relationship with her father begins to repair. I felt quite lectured in the middle where the author slightly overdid the point that Karen’s school education about the war hadn’t helped her to understand the impact in the people who survived it. This was a good but sad read.

review // Thank you to @netgalley and @bookouture for a free, e-ARC of #WhatOnlyWeKnow by @catherinehokin! This WWII, historical fiction novel explores the impacts of the war on survivors and their families - rather than focusing so squarely on telling the story of the war or Holocaust itself.
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Things I Loved: The start is rooted in the fashion industry, and we briefly see how those business were impacted during the war. The brief introduction we get into divided Berlin and the Wall coming down.
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This story is told in two timelines: a Jewish mother surviving WWII; and her daughter, trying to find answers after her mother’s suicide. Both the beginning and the end were slightly slow for me, but the bulk of the storyline was fast-paced, intriguing, and devastating. Unlike many books centered around the Holocaust, this felt less like a story of survival - but an exploration of how someone copes after surviving, when so many do not. {4/5 stars}
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CW: murder; genocide; suicide; harm to children
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I have read a lot of historical fiction as it’s one of my favourites genres and What Only We Know definitely is up there! It is set across the 1970s and WW2. It follows the stories of 1970s Karen, a teen and adult across the book as she discovers more about her mother’s tragic death. After a school trip to Berlin, she is left with more questions than answers. Her strained relationship with her father pushes her into returning to Berlin during another historically significant time and this time, she isn’t leaving with answers.
I found Karen to be unlikeable and childish but I could understand her persistence to discover more about her mother’s early life.
Overall, a strong 4 stars!

Thank you NetGalley, Bookouture and Catherine Hoking for gifting me an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
Karen is still grieving the loss of her mother Elizabeth when she returns home to take care of her ailing father. Elizabeth and her father don’t have the best relationship and she busys herself by cleaning out her mother’s things. There she finds an old photograph and love letter written in Germany after the second world war. Karen’s father refuses to speak about her mother’s life before they were married so Karen must find her answers herself. She travels to Berlin to rediscover who her mother was. She was not expecting to find out that her mother’s name is not Elizabeth and she had kept more secrets than Karen ever knew.
Told between two story lines we follow Karen on a journey to connect to her mother’s past, and Elizabeth’s story of a girl becoming a woman in Germany during a war. If you’re looking for a solid Historical Fiction that pulls at your heartstrings and gives you hope.

What Only We Know is a fictional book set in World War II era Germany. You are introduced to a well to do Jewish family who thinks nothing bad can happen to them because they are rich and well known, but how naive they are. I found myself screaming at the characters "Get out now!", but of course it would not have the good storyline if they had listened.
It jumps back and forth between the perspective of Liese, daughter of this prominent family, and her daughter Karen in the 1990's as she tries to figure out what drove her mother to commit suicide. Many family secrets are eventually exposed and you can understand why Liese is depressed. The war changed her as I'm sure it did many people. What I cannot understand is why she felt guilty for doing something any mother would have done in her situation.
Of course, it would not be a good story without a love connection and some happy situation coming out of all the sadness, and this book delivers. Overall, it was an interesting read, but the book seemed rather long and drawn out. Thank you NetGalley for another great read.

This book tugged at my heartstrings! I could place myself in Karen's shoes as she made the difficult decision to put her father in a home and begin the tedious task of selling his home. This, of course, has her finding things about her father she was previously unaware of.

The dual POV kept the story moving and kept me wanting to see how things turned out for everyone.

Favorite Quotes:

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 spread-eagled 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.

Catherine Hokin is an exceptional storyteller capable of making her readers feel every emotion the characters in her historical wartime novels go through and she is back with another unforgettable and heart-breaking novel that will hold readers spellbound from beginning to end: What Only We Know.

Caring for a sick parent is never easy, but when this difficult job is made even more trying by painful memories of the past, it becomes almost impossible and nobody knows this better than Karen Cartwright. Going back home to nurse her father means facing up to the past and to the pain of a family that had been forever changed by secrets, untruths and shocking lies. As soon as Karen steps back into a life she had thought she had left behind, she is confronted with a vengeance by the heart-wrenching pain of losing her beautiful mother Elizabeth and by her father’s closely guarded determination to keep secrets from the past close to his chest.

Karen has always had difficulty understanding her mother. Elizabeth had been cripplingly shy and in perpetual fear of monsters only she could see. Karen regrets the fact that her mother always seemed constantly on edge, however, as she begins to pack up the family home, she is stunned when she discovers a stranger’s tattered love letter to her with a German postmark. As Karen realises that she never really knew who her mother truly was, she starts digging deep into Elizabeth’s past and is transported back to wartime Germany where she becomes intrigued by the story of a young woman called Liese…

What links Elizabeth and Liese? Will her mother’s past help Karen discover the truth about her parents? Or are some secrets better kept hidden?

A captivating, evocative and immensely emotional tale written with flair, sensitivity and plenty of heart, What Only We Know is a poignant and mesmerizing historical novel of adversity, courage, strength and love that is best read with a big box of tissues nearby. Catherine Hokin writes so beautifully about sacrifice, redemption and heartbreak that readers will feel as if they are living the story alongside her characters.

An emotional historical novel from a wonderful storyteller, Catherine Hokin’s What Only We Know is a must-read for fans of The Nightingale and The Prisoner’s Wife

I absolutely love WW2 books. They are all heartbreaking but they also have hope and are inspiring. This story did not disappoint me. The two timelines wove together so perfectly. My favorite was the historical one of course. This definitely had a few surprises and was very heartwarming. I would recommend this book to any WW2 or historical fiction fan.

This, like many other WWII books, is a story of the resilience of people and the triumph of the human spirit over pain, bitterness and the dark horrors of war.

A parallel story to two women - modern day Karen trying to uncover the secrets of her mothers past and Liese who lived through terrifying reality of WWII in Berlin. The author moves seamlessly between the two times and stories.

The narrative, the characters and a most extraordinary story that kept me engaged from start to finish.

This was an interesting and heartbreaking read. Lieses’s story is heartbreaking. There was so much pain in her life. There was happiness too. I felt so sorry for her. Her pain would be unimaginable. I did not really like Karen. She came across as selfish. The details of World War 2 are harrowing to read in places. This is a memorable read.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

As well as being a book geek, I am also a history nerd. Even better is finding a book that ticks both the book and the history boxes. 'What Only We Know' certainly ticked both boxes. I thoroughly enjoyed reading 'What Only We Know' but more about that in a bit.
This book appealed to me because part of the story is set in 1930s Berlin. I studied German and Modern German History at university. Whilst living in Germany as part of my course, I had a tutor who had first hand experience of the Nazi Regime and I always found his lectures fascinating. I have also been to Berlin a couple of times and went on a tour of the main historical sites. I would say I know a fair bit about the Nazis but reading books such as 'What Only We Knew' help to bring the history alive.
It didn't take me long to get into this book. In fact after the first few chapters, I knew that I was going to thoroughly enjoy 'What Only We Know' and that I would find it increasingly difficult to put this book to one side for any length of time. This wasn't a book that I could binge read in one long reading binge. The story affected me emotionally and so I was able to read the story in chunks and then I would need a little while to reflect on what I had read, before carrying on to the next chunk of the story. The pages turned increasingly quickly as my desperation to find out how the story concluded grew and grew. I soon got to the end of the book. I can honestly say that a book hasn't affected me emotionally as much as this one did in a long time. I was gripped by this beautifully told story.
'What Only We Know' is beautifully and compassionately written. The author has clearly done a lot of research into what happened in 1930s Berlin and this shines through in her writing. The story is told from two different periods of time. One being the present day and the other being 1930s Germany. This way of telling the tale works really well and the story flows seamlessly. I loved the way in which Catherine's brilliantly vivid and realistic storytelling brought history alive as it were. Had I closed my eyes, it would have been easy for me to imagine 1930s Germany going on around me.
In short, I thoroughly enjoyed reading 'What Only We Know' and I would recommend it to other readers and especially to fans of historical fiction. I will be reading more of Catherine's work in the future. The score on the Ginger Book Geek board is a very well deserved 5* out of 5*.

“Hold On To Hope“

I don’t know about “Hold On To Hope”, but this was definitely a case of “Hold On To Your Hankie”!

Now I am not generally given to showing much emotion and I certainly don’t become overcome by books I read, especially not fiction. However, this one tugged at my heartstrings from the very first page – the very first sentence even – and it didn’t let me go until the final finger swipe of my kindle on the last page!

If this had been a film, which is not at all implausible, it would have been one I would have watched alone, as it is not my husband’s cup of tea at all, and I would have been blubbing like a baby for most of the way through – not a dry eye in the house!

There were oh! so many great quotes I could have shared from the book’s pages, however, any more than I have featured would begin amounting to some serious spoilers, so you’ll just have to discover them for yourself.

This book had just about everything I look for in a good read. A beginning which drew me in and intrigued me; an ending which although maybe a little typecast, was the only suitable conclusion from my point of view; and a storyline which was absorbing and held me in thrall throughout. Some great plot building and character development, just about rounded off the package.

Having recently recognised the 75th Anniversary of VE Day, this well researched and constructed storyline was particularly poignant in its intensity and profoundly touching. The trauma of being born famously Jewish in a Germany where war is only a hairsbreadth away, is just the beginning of this stunning wartime novel, which offers up snapshots taken through the intervening years, as it heads towards its tumultuous modern day conclusion. Told predominantly in two separate timelines, which intersect from time to time, I enjoyed this engaging style of writing, which was well laid out and straightforward to follow, although I did need to make date notes as I went along, just to make sure I was on top of the intertwining switches.

I could sense the urgency in the storyline, however Catherine took her time over setting the scene, then describing it in rich detail, making it an inclusive and very visual journey for the reader. Rare moments of spontaneous joy shine through in what is an otherwise uncomfortable, heart-breaking piece of social history, told and heard so many times over I’m sure, but for me, never so personally as through the eyes of this small group of individuals, who some 70 odd years on, are still reliving events, trying to make sense of, and coming to terms with, their personal traumas and memories. All still searching for a sense of belonging and most of all, closure and forgiveness for events which were always so much beyond their control.

The two main female protagonists, Liese and Karen, are each from either side of time divide, which gave me a hint as to where the storyline might be heading, but not what either they, nor I, might have to confront and endure along the way. Both women are strong and head-strong, yet weak, in almost equal measure. Both willing to confront their fears, but both unwilling and unable to reach out for the help which may mean that their struggles are not so lonely and for one of them, so final.

Karen in particular, feels that she has nothing left to lose by digging into an unspoken past which has silently dominated her life for so long. Unfortunately, she has long gone past the time of treading carefully and taking other people’s feelings into account, a hard lesson, which once learned, will soften the edges of her thinking and open her eyes to what was probably in front of her the whole time.

Liese’s story is the most difficult to even imagine, let alone put into words. Catherine’s skill in committing to words, a visual picture of her total and utter devastation and desolation, whilst still maintaining that basic need we all have for survival is emotionally draining to read. Sometimes though, I just wanted to shake her out of her stupor and remind her of the good things she still had to focus on in her life, which ultimately were not enough to assuage her guilt and the depths of despair to which her life had sunk, totally out of her control.

The two male protagonists, Michael and Andrew are both from the same side of the timeline, extremely complex characters, with totally opposing beliefs, both politically and personally. Each is as strong-willed and stubborn as the other, although Michael wears his heart on his sleeve and is very vocal and proactive when he believes in something with enough conviction. Whilst Andrew is equally recalcitrant, but brooding and silent for the most part.

Oh my goodness! Thanks to Catherine’s skilled narrative and dialogue, I found myself actually imagining this cast of characters as real people!

You really do just need to go and read the story for yourself!