Catherine Hokin is a Glasgow-based author, writing fiction inspired by World War Two and the Cold War. She has had eleven books published by Bookouture and Grand Central Publishing in the USA since 2020, all of which are partly or wholly based in Berlin and are available as e-books, audiobooks and paperbacks.
The Fortunate Ones, is a story of love and survival set in Berlin and Buenos Aires. Felix and Hannah meet unexpectedly in a Berlin dance hall. They are instantly smitten and immediately separated. Felix goes searching for the beautiful girl in blue but ‘Hannah’ is not who she seems and, when they encounter each other again, it is in the most terrible of circumstances.
What Only We Know – traces the devastating impact of a family secret, with a timeline split between the 1930s/1940s and the 1970s to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Lost Mother moves from the German film industry under Goebbels to 1950s Hollywood and covers the rarely explored story of the rise of the German American Bund in America and the internment of American Germans.
The Secretary returns to a divided Berlin, contrasting the story of a grandmother who lives a double life working for the Nazis and using the knowledge she gains in Himmler’s office to rescue the Jewish Berliners at risk from them and a granddaughter who falls foul of the Stasi.
The Hanni Winter series which is set in Berlin and Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1963 and features a photographer and a detective solving crimes, including a number which relate to Hanni’s father. In order the series comprises The Commandant’s Daughter, The Pilot’s Girl, The Girl in the Photo and Her Last Promise.
The German Child is a dual timeline novel set in WW2 Poland and 1990s Washington which examines the true nature and the legacy of the Lebensborn programme, and the beginning of the hunt for ex-Nazis living hidden lives in the USA.
The Secret Hotel in Berlin This is also a dual timeline novel, which focuses on the fortunes of a grand hotel between the 1930s and 1990s, the secret acts of resistance carried out there in WW2 and a story which has been told so often, it becomes the truth.
The Train That Took You Away Set in Berlin during and after WW2, this is the story of a lost child , a hidden painting and two women from very different worlds trying to mend their broken hearts