Catherine Hokin & Sally Hinchcliffe: Secrets and Settings in Historical Fiction

Historical fiction authors, Catherine Hokin and Sally Hinchcliffe discuss family secrets, haunting memories, love, strong female characters, and the atmospheric settings of their novels, spanning pre and post war periods. Catherine will also talk about the opportunities and challenges of writing a series.

About Our Authors

Catherine Hokin is the author of several novels inspired by World War Two, including the Hanni Winter series. She writes books set primarily in Berlin, which is her favourite city, a never-ending source of inspiration and also, very conveniently, where her son lives. Her novels cover the period from 1930 up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and deal with the long shadows left by war.

She is from the North of England but now lives very happily in Glasgow. She loves to travel and, if she’s not at her desk, she can usually be found in the cinema.

Catherine's Book: What Only We Know

When Karen Cartwright is unexpectedly called home to nurse her ailing father, she goes with a heavy heart. The house she grew up in feels haunted by the memory of her father’s closely guarded secrets about her beautiful mother Elizabeth’s tragic death years before.

As she packs up the house, Karen discovers an old photograph and a stranger’s tattered love letter to her mother postmarked from Germany after the war.

During her life, Karen struggled to understand her shy, fearful mother, but now she is realising there was so much more to Elizabeth than she knew. For one thing, her name wasn’t even Elizabeth, and her harrowing story begins long before Karen was born.

It’s 1941 in Nazi-occupied Berlin, and a young Jewish woman called Liese is being forced to wear a yellow star…

A beautiful and gripping wartime story about family secrets and impossible choices in the face of terrible hardship.

Sally Hinchcliffe was born in London but grew up all over the world in the wake of her father’s diplomatic career. She spent many years working at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew developing research systems for taxonomists until a two-year sabbatical in Eswatini gave her the impetus to take her writing seriously. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, her first novel, Out of a Clear Sky, was published by Macmillan in 2008. She moved to south-west Scotland to work as a writer and freelance editor full time, when she is now out exploring rural Dumfries and Galloway on her bike. Hare House is her second novel.

Sally's Book: Hare House

A woman leaves her old life behind, escaping to a remote estate in Scotland. But what secrets lie in her past? And how long can they stay hidden?

Hare House is not its real name, of course. I have, if you will forgive me, kept names to a minimum here, for reasons that will become understandable . . . 

In the first brisk days of autumn, a woman arrives in Scotland having left her job at an all-girls school in London in mysterious circumstances. Moving into a cottage on the remote estate of Hare House, she begins to explore her new home – a patchwork of hills, moorland and forest. But among the tiny roads, dykes and scattered houses, something more sinister lurks: local tales of witchcraft, clay figures and young men sent mad. 

Striking up a friendship with her landlord, Grant, and his younger sister, Cass, she begins to suspect that all might not be quite as it seems at Hare House. And as autumn turns to winter, and a heavy snowfall traps the inhabitants of the estate within its walls, tensions rise to fever pitch.