Spotlight & Giveaway: The Berlin Apartment by Bryn Turnbull

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Bryn Turnbull’s new release: The Berlin Apartment

For fans of Kate Quinn and Kristin Hannah, this sweeping love story follows a young couple whose lives are irrevocably changed when they’re separated overnight by the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Berlin 1961: When Uli Neumann proposes to Lise Bauer, she has every reason to accept. He offers her love, respect, and a life beyond the strict bounds of the East German society in which she was raised — which she longs to leave more than anything. But only two short days after their engagement, Lise and Uli are torn violently apart when barbed wire is rolled across Berlin, splitting the city into two hostile halves: capitalist West Berlin, an island of western influence isolated far beyond the iron curtain; and the socialist East, a country determined to control its citizens by any means necessary.

Soon, Uli and his friends in West Berlin hatch a plan to get Lise and her unborn child out of East Germany, but as distance and suspicion bleed into their lives and as weeks turn to months, how long can true love survive in the divided city?

“Wholly immersive and impeccably researched, Bryn Turnbull’s tale brings the time vividly to life.” –Toronto Star on The Paris Deception

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Berlin Apartment 

DECLASSIFIED on the orders of the Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Stasi Records Agency) on December 22, 1994.

19 JULY, 1962

My darling Uli,

The world can change in the space of a heartbeat. That’s what I recall telling myself on the day that you proposed. I think about that day so often, and it seems both more and less real to me than my life now: a moment spent on the precipice of joy and despair. In that space between your question and my answer, time seemed to slow, somehow: thinking on it now, I could swear that the sound of traffic outside the window fell silent; that the rain hung, suspended, over the stopped cars on Bernauer Strasse.

I suspect it must have been agony for you, sitting there with the ring between us, waiting for me to respond. But there was something in the silence I longed to savor: the possibility, I suppose, of what your question held for us both. The endless hope I felt in the moments before it all became real.
Perhaps I wanted to remain there because real life carries risk…real love carries pain. Bittersweet heartbreak. For isn’t that what lies at the heart of love, Uli: the inevitability of betrayal, in one form or another? Betrayal by infidelity, by apathy—by sickness, or death. A beginning contains, at its very core, an end.
I wonder. Is the risk of love worth it?
But I wasn’t thinking about any of that on the day you proposed. All that I could think about was wanting to live in the sweetness of that moment: in the space between question and answer.
I suppose, then, that there’s some justice in love.
Because I’ve lived in that unbearable purgatory every day since.
Yours always,
Lise
UNDELIVERED. Intercepted by the East German Ministry for State Security on 20 July, 1962.

PART 1
11 AUGUST, 1961
The apartment was on the topmost floor of a shrapnel-dusted building on Bernauer Strasse, an incongruous prewar oddity with plaster-molded windows and narrow hallways, which, in
comparison to its newer, wider neighbors, felt unexpectedly quaint. With its marble floors and papered walls, it seemed as if the building had seen all the joys and horrors of the past and
taken them in its stride: it rolled out an impersonal, dusty welcome to all who’d passed through its doors before, secure in the knowledge that they would one day pass their way out once
again. The cast-iron lift clattered a hello to those who chanced its dodgy mechanics, but the stairs were the more reliable option, the once-shimmering marble dulled beneath thousands
of footfalls.
As she walked upstairs, smoothing her hand along the banister, something about the building’s shabby state spoke to Lise, promising a future that she could see with crystal clarity—but
then, that sense of joy might have had more to do with the young man who held out his hand to her on the landing.
They stopped outside the fourth door to the left, and as Lise watched him jiggle the key in its rusted lock, her mind narrowed in on one single, giddying thought.
He’s going to propose. Uli Neumann is going to propose!
The door gave way with a groan and Uli turned with a smile. “Remind me to bring some oil for the hinges,” he said. “Watch that floorboard, it’s a little loose…”
Lise stepped inside, craning her neck to admire the faded wallpaper that crept up to curlicued plaster trim.

“It doesn’t look like much, I know,” Uli continued with a shrug of his narrow shoulders, “but with some new paint and furniture—a television, perhaps…” He grinned and ran a hand through his dark hair. “Just tell me you don’t hate it, that’s all I ask.”
“Hate it?” Like so many of the remaining Mietskaserne apartment blocks in Berlin, this one had survived the devastation of the war on luck alone, and it was luck that Lise chose to see in the apartment: luck, rather than the hard work that she and Uli would have in bringing the place up to standard.
To the right of the modest entrance hall was a kitchenette, the cupboards painted a cheery shade of eggshell blue: a slapdash conversion, Lise suspected, of what had once been half a bedroom. She opened the door closest to the entrance—what she had assumed to be a hall closet—to reveal a bathroom and smiled, her suspicions confirmed.
She continued down the hall, averting her eyes from the bedrooms opposite the kitchenette with a sudden, absurd attack of modesty. What was there to be modest about, when this apartment was a declaration of the commitment she and Uli had expressed to each other in everything but words?
“I love it,” she said finally, meeting Uli in the sitting room at the end of the hall. She smiled as he fussed over the placement of secondhand furniture around the fireplace, and pictured the room as it would be when she and Uli were finished with it, with colorful, fresh wallpaper and a new living room set from KaDeWe department store, porcelain mugs hung from the painted trim of the kitchenette’s pass-through window. She thought of Uli, mixing drinks for their guests from a bar cart while she checked on the progress of a roast dinner; the sound of a baby screeching in its bassinet.
He finished nudging the ottoman in place and looked up. “You’re not just saying that, are you? You wouldn’t prefer some impossibly expensive new build near the Ku’damm with functional plumbing?”
“Functional plumbing would be a draw,” Lise replied lightly, pulling aside the dusty curtains to flood the room with sunlight, “but no. This is ours. It feels like us.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He stepped forward to wrap Lise in his arms, and she allowed herself to fall into his kiss. Would she ever tire of Uli’s irrepressible optimism? The brightness in Uli’s soul seemed purpose-built to illuminate the darkness in Lise’s own, drawing her out of her tendency toward gloom and bringing her, willingly, toward joy.
Uli pulled back, his gray eyes sparkling behind the glass of his horn-rimmed spectacles. Tall and slender, with rounded shoulders and a mess of dark hair that looked as if it had never made the acquaintance of a hairbrush, Uli resembled, to Lise’s mind, Buddy Holly, but for the deeply scored laugh lines that gave rare distinction to his wide smile.
He led her to the window, nestling his chin in the hollow of her collarbone as they looked out onto bustling Bernauer Strasse. Below, cars and trucks trundled along the rain-soaked street as people wandered the sidewalk in groups of twos and threes, occasionally disappearing beneath the leafy canopy of slender saplings before reappearing further down the pavement. From here, she could see past the parkette on the opposite side of the road where green-clad Grenztruppen patrolled their rigid routes, past the bombed-out remains of several apartment buildings on Schönholzer Strasse and into the darkened, postage-stamp window of her family’s apartment on the top floor of 56 Rheinsberger Strasse.
“I know how hard it’s been for you to think about leaving,” Uli said, his breath warm on her cheek. “I hope that by being only a few streets away, you won’t feel you have to choose.”
She stared at the windows of her family apartment, picturing her father, Rudolph, as he’d been that morning, leafing through a medical reference book in the living room; Paul, finishing a coffee before reporting for his shift at the police station. Between Rheinsberger Strasse and the center of Bernauer Strasse ran the invisible divide between East and West Berlin, and though she’d grown up in the East, West Berlin was the side of the city that truly held her heart. It was here, in West Berlin, where she attended university, hoping to follow in her father’s footsteps as a doctor; here, where she spent her time with Uli.
She smiled. “And you’d be all right, would you, living a block away from my father? From Paul?”
“I get along well with your dad. As for Paul… We’ve just not spent enough time together. That’s all.

Excerpt. ©Bryn Turnbull. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

Giveaway: 2 Print copies of The Berlin Apartment by Bryn Turnbull -Open to 2 U.S. winners!

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Meet the Author:

Bryn Turnbull is the internationally bestselling author of The Woman Before Wallis. With a master of letters in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews, a master of professional communication from Toronto Metropolitan University and a bachelor’s degree in English literature from McGill University, Bryn focuses on finding stories of women lost within the cracks of the historical record. She lives in Toronto. https://www.brynturnbull.com/

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