Hi, Bryn! Welcome back! How has the past two years been since we last spoke?

Thank you! They’ve been busy in the best possible way. I’m at the end of a four-books-in-five-years writing cycle and I’m looking forward to a little downtime.

Your latest novel, The Berlin Apartment, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Gripping. Heartfelt. Tender. Romantic. Redemptive.

What can readers expect?

Readers will meet Uli Neumann and Lise Bauer, star-crossed lovers whose hours-old engagement gets interrupted when the Berlin Wall goes up between them. Told from both Uli and Lise’s perspectives, the story charts life in capitalist West Berlin and socialist East Germany as the couple fights to put their love story back on track and reunite. Readers can expect heart-pounding action, bitter betrayal, Cold War intrigue and a meant-to-be romance for the ages.

Where did the inspiration for The Berlin Apartment come from?

The inspiration for this story came from a podcast I listened to during the pandemic, called Intrigue: Tunnel 29, which chronicled the real-life efforts of Free University students who dug beneath the Berlin Wall to rescue friends and family who wanted to escape from East Berlin. The idea of a group of twenty-year-olds who defied the Stasi enthralled me: I knew I wanted to tell their story through the eyes of a couple trapped on opposite sides of the Cold War conflict.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I’ve found that in each of my novels a side character has crept up and played a much larger role in the story than I’d originally planned. In The Berlin Apartment, I ended up falling in love with Inge, Lise’s best friend – a Swedish medical student who joins Uli’s quest to bring Lise across the barbed wire.

Can you tell us about your research process for The Berlin Apartment?

Unlike my other novels, which take place further back in the 20th century, this one is much more immediate — the Wall came down in my lifetime, and there’s such a wealth of eyewitness accounts and personal stories to draw from. One particular area of interest for me was research into East Germany’s surveillance state, and particularly the Stasi, whose reach into East German homes and families was legendary. I was captivated by the personal accounts of people whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Stasi – in some cases, they had no idea they were under such close surveillance until long after the Wall came down.

Did you face any challenges whilst writing?

I had one or two dark nights of the soul while writing this book where I considered chucking it all in and retraining as a museum nightwatchman or professional mermaid, but I’m glad I persisted.

Do you find it daunting to write historical fiction?

I do in the sense that I want so much to get it right. I always want to portray a time and place as accurately as possible. I’m something of a perfectionist, so when I find out that I got some historical grace note wrong, I beat myself up for days.

What’s next for you?

I ought to say a bit of a break is in order, but the second I finished this novel I got ideas for my next two, which I’m writing concurrently! One is historical, the other is my first contemporary – and it’s a rom com. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but then so am I.

Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?

I’m halfway through David Nicholls’ You Are Here, which might go down as my favourite read of 2024 – it’s a funny and hopeful story about a pair of misfits who hike across the English countryside, and I just don’t want it to end – he’s a remarkable writer. I recently read Shara Moon’s Let Us March On, a lovely story about Lizzie McDuffie, a White House maid who became FDR’s unofficial secretary and civil rights advocate; and of course Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club is sitting on my bedside table. I can’t wait to dive in!

 Will you be picking up The Berlin Apartment? Tell us in the comments below!

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Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Bryn Turnbull’s The Paris Deception, which is out now!

Sophie Dix fled Stuttgart with her brother as the Nazi regime gained power in Germany. Now, with her brother gone and her adopted home city of Paris conquered by the Reich, Sophie reluctantly accepts a position restoring damaged art at the Jeu de Paume museum under the supervision of the ERR—a German art commission using the museum as a repository for art they’ve looted from Jewish families.

Fabienne Brandt was a rising star in the Parisian bohemian arts movement until the Nazis put a stop to so-called “degenerate” modern art. Still mourning the loss of her firebrand husband, she’s resolved to muddle her way through the occupation in whatever way she can—until her estranged sister-in-law, Sophie, arrives at her door with a stolen painting in hand.

Soon the two women embark upon a plan to save Paris’s “degenerates,” working beneath the noses of Germany’s top art connoisseurs to replace the paintings in the Jeu de Paume with skillful forgeries—but how long can Sophie and Fabienne sustain their masterful illusion?

June 1940

Sophie Brandt bent over her desk, working a small awl beneath the rusty nail wedged into the frame of a painting. She lifted the nail, carefully pulling back the canvas from the shattered edge of the stretcher. The painting—one of Gauguin’s earlier pieces—had been left mercifully undamaged in the fall that had broken the stretcher, remnants of which she’d swept up off the marble floor of the gallery, inspecting the debris for any flakes of pigment that might have been rattled loose by the careless rumble of German tanks down the Rue de Rivoli.

She lifted the canvas and set it aside, clearing away the bro­ken stretcher before pulling out a new one she’d made based on the old frame’s measurements. To Sophie, this was the most in­timate part of the restoration process: the canvas, devoid of the musculature provided by the frame or supports, holding only a suggestion of its former shape. She worked quickly, tacking the linen to the stretcher midway down the painting before pull­ing it tight over its new bones. The painting seemed to breathe as she worked, responding to her touch with a relieved groan as she hammered the stretcher keys in place.

She turned the painting over, satisfied at its taut appearance. Paul would be proud. Sophie had been a restorer at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris for nearly two years now, and while she’d made friends in the French art community, there was no one, perhaps, she was as close to as Paul Rosenberg. Until re­cently, he had been one of Paris’s most preeminent art dealers, specializing in the modern art which Sophie loved best. He’d become Sophie’s first true friend in Paris—and, she suspected, had put in a friendly word with Monsieur Girard at the Jeu de Paume that had resulted in her job offer.

Paul had escaped France at the first rumblings of war, his beautiful gallery shuttered before the mass exodus of Parisians made it difficult to leave the city. But for the paintings he’d deposited at the Jeu de Paume for safekeeping, it was as if Paul Rosenberg had never lived in Paris.

Sophie recalled her last visit to his quiet gallery. They had lin­gered in front of Picasso’s portrait of Paul’s wife and daughter. It was a good likeness, thought Sophie, one that captured the quiet, steady presence of Madame Rosenberg, and the wonder­fully disgruntled expression on the baby’s cherubic face.

“They’ll be here soon,” Paul had said, his thin moustache set over stern lips. He turned away from the painting. “Your coun­trymen. Come to claim their due.”

“Not my countrymen,” she’d replied. “They’ve not been my countrymen for a long time.”

Paul lit a cigarette. “Brave words,” he’d told her, snapping the brass lid of his lighter shut. “But once the Germans arrive, will you be so quick to disassociate yourself?”

Holed away in her laboratory, Sophie listened for the sound of jackboots outside the open casement windows, the faint snarl of German echoing through tinny loudspeakers from the Arc de Triomphe.

She walked over to the window and pulled it closed, fasten­ing the latch before returning her attention to the painting. She thought once more on Paul’s question.

Now that the Germans were here, she didn’t know the answer.

One week earlier

The sky over Paris was dark, the sun a pale coin in the sky that flickered in and out of focus behind billows of soot-blackened clouds. In her attic apartment, Fabienne wrenched open the win­dow, wedging the stump of a paintbrush in the frame to keep it open as she eased herself onto the sill.

Though the fires were burning in the city’s petroleum reserves on the outskirts of town, the smoke had made its way into the Left Bank’s narrow streets, choking the crowded cobblestones with its acrid stench. Fabienne could see the logic behind the city’s decision to burn what they could rather than leave behind spoils of war for the enemy, but the move had sparked panic among the fleeing population. In the streets below, she watched a man and woman argue beside an idling Peugeot, its roof rack laden with suitcases. A child, wailing, as his father swept him into an overflowing handcart.

“You’re too late, you know!” Fabienne called down. Tucked six floors up in the eaves of her building’s mansard roof, Fabienne knew the couple couldn’t hear her, but it felt good to shout all the same. “They’ll be here by this evening!” She reached back into the kitchen to pull out a half-drunk bottle of red wine. “What’s the point, when they’ve already won?”

And the Germans had won—that much was clear. They’d won without having to fire a gun within the city limits; they’d won without having dropped a single incendiary bomb. The thought that Paris had given up without a fight rankled Fabi­enne. Surely someone, somewhere, shared her sense of injustice? Paris was the city of la Révolution: the city of barricades in the streets, its citizens fighting and fucking and acting out their pas­sions with the conviction of players in a penny dreadful. Surely Paris could muster some semblance of resistance before rolling onto its back for the German army?

She tapped her cigarette against the windowsill and the ember floated down, past the modest fourth-and fifth-floor apartments, where she could hear Madame de Frontenac pleading with her balding husband through the open window; past the elegant second-story apartment with its gracious wrought iron balcony. Had the apartment’s residents, the Lowensteins, left Paris? Fa­bienne pictured Madame Lowenstein, with her cream-colored Chanel suits and iron curls; Monsieur Lowenstein, his beloved black-and-white toy poodle tucked beneath his arm. She hoped they’d been able to get out—she hoped most of the city’s Jewish residents had been able to flee, before the long line of refugees choked the railroads and motorways to a standstill.

In a few short days, everything Fabienne knew would change: it was inevitable, once Paris became a conquered city. What would remain of the France she’d known her whole life? What would remain of herself? Her talent, her courage, her convictions—all the parts of herself that Dietrich had once loved. What would remain, at the end of the war?

She watched the long line of vehicles snake its way along the Boulevard Saint-Germain and turned back into the gloom of her empty apartment, wishing she could feel some appreciation for the gravity of the moment: fear, panic, worry. Anger at the thought of her beloved city left unguarded; despair at the no­tion that she’d been left behind to survive in a city circling the drain of war.

She glanced back at the half-finished painting on her easel, the canvas she’d not been able to finish in over two years; swirls of color, black on blue. Desiccated paintbrushes lay on the cross­bar, the dried oil on the bristles matching the exact shade of her husband’s eyes.

There was nothing to be frightened of because the worst had already happened. There was nothing more the Germans could take from her.

Excerpted from THE PARIS DECEPTION. Copyright © 2023 by Bryn Turnbull. Published by MIRA, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins.

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We chat with Bryn Turnbull all about her new release The Last Grand Duchess, along with writing, book recommendations, and more.

Hi, Bryn! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Thanks so much for inviting me to chat with you! To tell you a bit about myself, I’m a Toronto girl, born and raised, and despite my efforts to the contrary I’m a writer, born and raised too. Prior to writing my first novel I worked in corporate communications, but I became a full-time author when I came across Thelma Furness, who became the protagonist of my first novel, The Woman Before Wallis. I’m happiest when I’m outdoors, I adore traveling, and I live with my puppy Edie, who I’m not entirely convinced isn’t a reincarnation of Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon.

How has the first month of 2022 been for you?

Between a new puppy, the ongoing pandemic, an impending book launch, another book in development, a broken hand, and the arrival of my first niece, it’s been somewhat hectic… but I enjoy hectic. It’s certainly preferable to the alternative!

When did you first discover your love for writing?

I’ve been a writer pretty much from the get-go, as my long-suffering parents can attest to – I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t scribbling stories on the backs of napkins or in the margins of my textbooks. I’ve always loved storytelling in all its formats, but the first time I knew I might have an audience was when I gained something of a reputation for my fireside stories when I was a camp counsellor: I’d end up telling sagas about the Loch Ness Monster that lasted four nights in a row, or come up with sequels about what happened to Disney princesses after the credits rolled.

Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!

The first book I ever remember reading, and I’m not kidding, was called The Magic Toybox – I’m sure it’s long out of print as it was ancient in the early nineties, and my gran did most of the reading, but I made her teach me how to read it one summer because I was convinced that all the other kids going into first grade that September would already be reading chapter books. The one that made me want to become an author was The Sky is Falling, by Kit Pearson – I read it when I was about ten or eleven, it was about child evacuees to Canada during the Second World War, and I read it until the covers fell apart. A book that I absolutely adore and can’t stop thinking about is The Library of Legends, by Janie Chang – it tells the real-life story of the evacuation of Nanking’s university students, threading through elements of magical realism through the books the students carried… it’s a truly special read.

Your new novel, The Last Grand Duchess, is out February 8^th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Opulent, tragic, passionate, turbulent, bildungsroman.

What can readers expect?

This book recounts the fall of the Romanovs as witnessed by Olga, eldest daughter of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna. While many novels centering on the last days of the Romanovs focus either on Alexandra’s relationship with Rasputin, or on one of the many Anastasia pretenders that cropped up in the years following the Russian revolution, I wanted to write a book about the Romanovs that centered on who they were as people – not as royal figures or political victims, but as a family.

Where did the inspiration for The Last Grand Duchess come from?

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the Romanovs, but had never really considered the daughters on their own merits before: so often in the history books, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia are viewed as a unit (known as OTMA) rather than as individuals. They’re also referred to as “children” in popular culture, when in fact they were young women when they died: Olga, for example, was 23 years old. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I’d never given much thought to who they were beyond the popular image of them as sheltered princesses, until I watched a documentary which referenced a documented historical moment where Olga remarked that she understood why Rasputin had to be assassinated. That really stuck with me, and made me realize that Olga was much more was politically aware, and cognizant of the precarious situation her family was in, than I’d previously given her credit for.

Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?

One of the biggest challenges, no surprise, was the pandemic itself. Toronto had the longest sustained covid-19 lockdown in the world, and that degree of isolation was incredibly wearing – and not exactly conducive to creative thought. That said, there was a silver lining of sorts: half of the book takes place when Olga and her family are under house arrest, and while the lockdown in no way resembled what the family went through, I think it gave me a deeper understanding of the monotony and uncertainty of what their days must have been like.

Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

The character of Dmitri Pavlovich really spoke to me. I found his character arc the most interesting to write, going from someone who lives in the heart of imperial life to one of the people who destroys it from within.

Can you tell us a bit about your research process for The Last Grand Duchess?

For me, setting is such an important part of writing a historical novel, so I love being able to visit the locations where my books are set – however, given that I wrote this book in 2020/21, it will come as no surprise to learn that I wasn’t able to travel to Russia to visit the imperial palaces.  Instead, I did most of my research online, and I’m so grateful to people who uploaded their travelogues of the Alexander Palace and Tobolsk to Youtube. I also did a lot of reading, of course – the Romanovs are the most heavily documented family in history, so there are lots of resources to choose from, including their own diaries and journals.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on my third book! It’s set in occupied France in 1940 and deals with Nazi art theft.

Lastly, do you have any 2022 book recommendations for our readers?

So, so many great books are coming out this year, including Eliza Knight’s The Mayfair Bookshop, Erika Robuck’s Sisters of Night and Fog, Kate Quinn’s The Diamond Eye, Natalie Jenner’s Bloomsbury Girls, and Rachel McMillan’s The Mozart Code. I recently read Madeline Martin’s The Last Bookshop in London, which came out in 2021, and it was simply wonderful.

Will you be picking up The Last Grand Duchess? Tell us in the comments below!

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