Crime thriller set in AMSTERDAM
Ten Great Books set in BERLIN
11th August 2025
Ten great books set in Berlin. Berlin is Germany’s capital, a dynamic metropolis with a rich and often turbulent history. From its medieval origins, it rose to become a major European power, serving as the capital of Prussia and later the German Empire. The city was devastated during World War II and then famously divided by the Berlin Wall for over four decades, becoming the focal point of the Cold War.
Since its reunification in 1990, Berlin has re-emerged as a global hub of culture, politics, and innovation. The city is renowned for its vibrant arts scene, world-class museums, and iconic landmarks such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building. It is also a centre for technology and startups, with a diverse economy and a reputation for being a city of creative expression and constant change.
Here are ten of our favourite books set in and around this amazing city.
Berlin by Bea Setton
When Daphne Ferber arrives in Berlin for a fresh start in a thrilling new city, the last thing she expects is to run into more drama than she left behind.
Of course, she knew she’d need to do the usual: make friends, acquire lovers, grapple with German and a whole new way of life. She even expected the long nights gorging alone on family-sized jars of Nutella, and the pitfalls of online dating in another language. The paranoia, the second-guessing of her every choice, the covert behaviours? Probably come with the territory.
But one night, something strange, dangerous and entirely unexpected intervenes, and life in bohemian Kreuzberg suddenly doesn’t seem so cool.
Just how much trouble is Daphne in, and who – or what – is out to get her?
I Laugh Me Broken by Bridget van der Zijpp
A fearless novel that tackles a difficult subject, I laugh me broken tells the story of a woman finding the courage to face her genetic heritage.
When Ginny makes contact with her estranged relatives and discovers that her genetic heritage may contain a devastating fault, she bolts to Berlin, leaving her loving fiancé in the dark.
Rather than face up to the life-changing implications of this news, she loses herself in the transient, hedonistic city. As she meets its inhabitants and absorbs their tangle of stories, she tries to gather the courage to take the genetic test that will either free her or define her future.
I laugh me broken is a sharply-drawn, courageous novel exploring the human condition, the inescapability of the past and the choices that are ours to make.
Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp, Jo Heinrich (Translator)
A woman approaching the ‘invisible years’ of middle age abandons her failing writing career to retrain as a chiropodist in the suburb of Marzahn, once the GDR’s largest prefabricated housing estate, on the outskirts of Berlin. From her intimate vantage point at the foot of the clinic chair, she keenly observes her clients and co-workers, delving into their personal histories with all their quirks and vulnerabilities. Each story stands alone as a beautifully crafted vignette, told with humour and poignancy; together they form a nuanced and tender portrait of a community. Part memoir, part collective history, Katja Oskamp’s love letter to the inhabitants of Marzahn is a stunning reflection on life’s progression and our ability to forge connections in the unlikeliest of places.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, Sophie Hughes (Translator)
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city’s twenty-four-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp. Superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, scathing and brilliantly affecting.
The Girl Behind the Wall by Mandy Rowbotham
A city divided.
When the Berlin Wall goes up, Karin is on the wrong side of the city. Overnight, she’s trapped under Soviet rule in unforgiving East Berlin and separated from her twin sister, Jutta.
Two sisters torn apart.
Karin and Jutta lead parallel lives for years, cut off by the Wall. But Karin finds one reason to keep going: Otto, the man who gives her hope, even amidst the brutal East German regime.
One impossible choice…
When Jutta finds a hidden way through the wall, the twins are reunited. But the Stasi have eyes everywhere, and soon Karin is faced with a terrible decision: to flee to the West and be with her sister, or sacrifice it all to follow her heart?
The Silence in Between by Josie Ferguson
Imagine waking up and a wall has divided your city in two. Imagine that on the other side is your child…
Lisette is in hospital with her baby boy. The doctors tell her to go home and get some rest, that he’ll be fine.
When she awakes, everything has changed. Because overnight, on 13 August 1961, the border between East and West Berlin has closed, slicing the city – and the world – in two.
Lisette is trapped in the east, while her newborn baby is unreachable in the west. With the streets in chaos and armed guards ordered to shoot anyone who tries to cross, her situation is desperate.
Lisette’s teenage daughter, Elly, has always struggled to understand the distance between herself and her mother. Both have lived for music, but while Elly hears notes surrounding every person she meets, for her mother – once a talented pianist – the music has gone silent.
Perhaps Elly can do something to bridge the gap between them. What begins as the flicker of an idea turns into a daring plan to escape East Berlin, find her baby brother, and bring him home….
Based on true stories, The Silence in Between is a page-turning, emotional epic that will stay with you long after you finish reading.
The Moment by Douglas Kennedy
Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine, in touch only with his daughter and still trying to recover from the end of a long marriage, his solitude is disrupted one wintry morning by the arrival of a box that is postmarked Berlin. The name on the box-Dussmann-unsettles him completely, for it belongs to the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-six years ago in Berlin at a time when the city was cleaved in two and personal and political allegiances were frequently haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War.
Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless is forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person and in the process relive those months in Berlin when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann, the woman to whom he lost his heart, was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow that gradually rewrote both their destinies.
A love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power, The Moment explores why and how we fall in love-and the way we project on to others that which our hearts so desperately seek.
Friedrichstrasse 19 by Emma Harding
Sigi lived upstairs from Sara at Friedrichstrasse 19 yet before they met, Sara had no idea that Berlin could be so thrillingly irreverent or that sex could be so intoxicatingly wonderful. But then came the war, and hunger, loneliness and barbed wire. It was just as a young girl, a protegee of The Academy of Magical Arts situated in Friedrichstrasse at the start of the century, had predicted.
Battered and divided, Berlin, like it’s people, endured. Hans yearns to be part of the boundary-breaking spirit of the age but he’s haunted by his mother’s part in the war and the absence of a father. Ilse, who escaped from the East, wants nothing more than the freedom she risked her life for.
In 1989 in a wild act of spontaneous joy, Heike leapt from the Wall into the arms of a stranger from the West. Thirty years later, she recognises that what she’d willed to be destiny was nothing more than naivety. Recently divorced, she moves into Friedrichstrasse, to begin a new life. But it’s impossible not to hear the echoes of the secrets and lies, visions and misunderstandings, lost loves and fatal mistakes, that have come before her.
Time-travelling between decades, through the interlocking lives of six people, Friedrichstrasse 19 relives the tumultuous experience of a city on the frontline of history.
Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel
2009. Berlin.
Two art students arrive from New York, both desperate for the city to solve their problems.
Zoe is grieving for her high school best friend, murdered months before in her hometown in Florida.
Hailey is rich, obsessed with the exploits of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears and wants to be a Warholian legend.
Together they rent a once-magnificent apartment from eccentric crime writer Beatrice Becks. With little to fill their time, they spend their nights twisting through Berlin’s club scene and their days hungover.
Soon inexplicable things start happening in the apartment and the two friends suspect they are being watched by Beatrice. Convinced that their landlord is using their lives as inspiration for her next thriller novel, they decide to beat her at her own game. The girls start hosting wild parties in the flat and quickly gain notoriety, with everyone clamouring for an invite to ‘Beatrice’s.’ But ultimately they find themselves unable to control the narrative and it spirals into much darker territory .
Sisters of Berlin by Juliet Conlin
BERLIN 2019.
A young writer is brutally attacked in her home and left for dead. For her sister Nina Bergmann, it’s the beginning of a nightmare that will threaten to destroy her marriage, her job and ultimately her life. As she sets out to unravel the truth about what really happened to her sister, Nina comes face-to-face with inner demons she believed long since banished and discovers that her sister’s past and that of the once-divided city are intertwined in unimaginable ways. The Wall may be gone, but its legacy still haunts Berlin . .
We hope you enjoy our selection of great books set in Berlin. If we’ve missed any of your favourites, please add them in the Comments below.
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As a poetic view of Berlin and its role in 20th century history – “Berliners” by John Simmons published by Paekakariki Press