St. Andrews, a Master of Professional Communication from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Bachelor's degree in English Literature from McGill University, Turnbull focuses on finding stories of women lost within the cracks of the historical record.
Her debut novel, The Woman Before Wallis, was named one of the top ten bestselling works of Canadian fiction for 2020 and became an international bestseller. Her second, The Last Grand Duchess, came out in February 2022 and spent eight weeks on the Globe & Mail and Toronto Star bestseller lists. It was followed by The Paris Deception, which came out in May 2023.
Turnbull applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Berlin Apartment, and reported the following:
Given my familiarity with The Berlin Apartment (slightly more than glancing), I felt that I wasn't the best equipped to undergo the Page 69 Test - rather, I enlisted the services of a friend who agreed to act as guinea pig on my behalf.Visit Bryn Turnbull's website.
But first, a quick summary of the book. The Berlin Apartment opens on a sunny summer's day in 1961, where we meet Uli, a student in his final year at the Free University in West Berlin, showing his fiancée Lise the apartment he bought for them, close to the open border that divides West Berlin from East. When the Berlin Wall goes up, Lise finds herself on the "wrong side", so to speak: though technically she's East German, she's built her life in the expectation of one day coming west but, as for so many, the erection of the Wall stops her future in its tracks. What follows is a story of love, loss, betrayal and redemption, as Uli embarks upon building a tunnel to rescue Lise from East Berlin and Lise strives to conceal her plans to flee from the watchful eyes of the East German secret police.
Back to my guinea pig. What he got out of the page was, in fact, a pretty accurate sense of what the novel entails. In the scene in question, Lise, our East German protagonist, is applying for a job in East Berlin - a job which she doesn't have any real interest in having, given that the life she wants to live, with the father of her unborn child, exists on the other side of the Berlin Wall. The scene alludes to the invisible but all-too-real control wielded by the East German state over its people; Lise worries about the impact that her actions, whether in staying in East Germany or going, will have on her East German family. The word that stood out most to my guinea pig friend was at the very bottom of the page: surrender. Surrender - or the perception of surrender - to the State was part of survival in East Germany, and it's this tightrope that Lise strives to walk as she accepts the job, knowing all the while that her real future is inching ever closer, beneath her feet, as Uli digs.
My Book, The Movie: The Paris Deception.
The Page 69 Test: The Paris Deception.
Q&A with Bryn Turnbull.
My Book, The Movie: The Berlin Apartment.
--Marshal Zeringue
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