I was really excited to read Miss Graham's Cold War cookbook for the fresh take on a WWII novel. Using codes within recipes is a new spin for the subject.  I did enjoy reading this book but it seemed a little slow or maybe I have just read too many books on the same general topic.  Thank you to NetGalley, HarperCollins and TheBookClubGirls for an ARC.

I wanted to like this one. I very much liked the idea of it but it was too long and it dragged. I thought Edith was fine as a main character but it took her quite a while to get to Germany.  I'm not sure why the author bothered describing the school and kids at all since none of that was really involved in the plot. I liked some of the intrigue and trying to decide which characters were 'good' or 'bad' but it just moved too slowly to be very exciting.

Thanks Netgalley for the ARC!

Thank you to netgalley.com for the ARC.

Yes, another book about WWII in Europe...but another one with a unique take and time period. The story primarily takes place in Germany directly after the war ends and Germany is being split up in two halves. Interspered within a story of espionage, friendship, and a very not sappy romance are recipes of traditional English, German, and Austrian dishes.

While there are the heartbreaking and horrific story lines that occur with any story about World War II, this had a different take on it. It was interesting to see life within Germany right after they had lost the warm and needed to rebuild.

This held my interest and am interested in reading more from this author.

I will start by saying that I highly recommend this title which is a story of Germany in the aftermath of WWII.  Set in several countries, including Britain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, it is the story of the titular Edith Graham. As the novel opens,  Miss Graham is an educator living at home with her mother, a life that she found somewhat dull and meaningless. When she is offered the opportunity to go to Germany to help with the re-establishment of educational facilities, she is really for the change and challenge. But...much more is in store for Edith.


Readers learn that, before the war,Edith was in love with a handsome, smart, German man named Kurt. Miss Graham also became close to his wife Elisabeth. What happened to this couple during WWII? How did they survive?  What did they do? What happened to them afterwards? Their story line forms a large part of the narrative.


Around Edith are various agents, each with their own, and sometimes overlapping, agendas. There are Dori, Vera and Adeline for the women, each of whom has been shaped by their wartime experiences. In addition, there are the men; they represent the U.S. and the British. What are their agendas? How will these intersect with those of the women?


There is espionage here and, after a slightly slow start, a book that had me turning the pages and connecting with the characters. In addition to an excellent plot, the book raises a number of issues: what was life like for the Germans as the Americans, Russians and British entered their defeated country? How do people survive when they have nothing, not even food? Do ends justify means? Who can be trusted? Can there be justice in a world that has been turned upside down?


As readers follow the story, each chapter begins with an entry from Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook. Readers will learn the significance of these menus as they become involved with the novel.


I have read many books of historical fiction about WWII. This one is a bit different in that it largely takes place after the war. It is a compelling read and one that I recommend most highly. I give it five stars, something I do not often do.


Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this read in exchange for an honest review.

In the aftermath of WW2, Britain has set up the Control Commission in their occupied territory.  Edith applies to become an education officer and is immediately recruited to act as a spy and help track down a missing Nazi war criminal that she once knew as a college student.  In order to pass messages back and forth with London, she uses her alter ego, a cooking columnist that sends recipes to family and friends.  As she gets closer to finding her old friend, more danger arises as many in the country are still loyal to the old regime.

For those who love and those may want a slight change from WW2 historical Fiction, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook provides a different look at the time period and the years following the war in which Germany was rebuilt.  The idea that many civilians harbored fugitives in the attempt to restore the Reich is an area that is often glossed over in typical American/British war fiction, and the trade offs between different groups are even less well known.  It leads to many questions regarding which war criminals remained free in order to capture the major players.

The book was provided to me via preview copy on NetGalley in exchange for my thoughts.

I loved the idea of spies communicating through recipes, so I was very excited to read this book! The story opens when the main character is old and nearing the end of her life, before jumping to the past where most of the story takes place. It takes a long time to get going and I felt that the book was a bit too long overall with the lengthy descriptions of not only food, but scenery and clothes, etc. I think I was trying too hard to decipher the hidden clues in each recipe... Sometimes I could pick up on the coded messages but other times I was either missing it or maybe nothing was there and it was just meant to be what they were eating at the time. I think I was expecting too much from them, because I started to notice that when there was something we were supposed to get from the recipe it would be pointed out later in the chapter, so I quit trying so hard and that improved my enjoyment of the book!

It was both fascinating and disturbing to learn about Operation Paperclip and the other programs that allowed Nazi murderers to escape justice. This is why I love reading historical fiction. Even though it's fiction I still end up learning things that were left out of the history I was taught in school. The WW2 Era/Female Spy genre is getting a bit overdone, but this book is unique enough to stand out. Edith is a relatable character and once I hit the halfway mark, I had to keep reading to the end.

The description for this book really grabbed me. Female espionage in Cold War-era Berlin? Hunting down Nazis in hiding? Count me in! But I found the story dry from the beginning. I never took to any of the characters and felt little emotion about anything that happens to them. I will say that I did not see the end playing out as it did and that definitely gave me a wait, what?! moment. Overall, this was a book that I very much wanted to love and was left disappointed.

The novel begins with Dori in a fine Swill hotel. She is elderly and is near the end of her life. She is looking at a tattered old cookbook. Flashback to 1947. Dori was part of a sort of spy ring with her friends Addie who was a photographer and Edith who was a teacher. As the story unfolds, Edith seems to be the main character. Edith who wants to be a food writer has gone to post war Germany to help set up and supervise schools for the children in the British occupied Germany. She becomes embroiled in the search for a war criminal. She knew Kurt before the war so she is asked to help look for him. However, she soon learns to her horror that her former lover committed some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. The people she is working for do not plan to bring him to trial. They just want to use his knowledge. Her friend Dori is associated with a group who want him brought to justice. Edith finds herself in a very difficult position unable to trust anyone besides her two friends and she even has to watch how much she tells them. The ending was not predictable.

I found this slow at first, but I stuck with it and I'm so glad that I did - loyalty and allegiance in a newly post-WWII Germany. The author knows her history of the time period and it shows in this well crafted, excellent read. 

I received a digital advance copy this book for my honest opinion. My thanks to Celia Rees, HarperCollins Publishers / William Morrow Paperbacks, and NetGalley.

Celia Rees has taken you on a post World War II adventure.  The strong women in this book made me realize that war is not just about men but about women also played a key role during and after the war.  Edith is a single, plain women who is a teacher and speaks fluent German. She also likes recipes and writes cooking tips under the name Stella Shelling.  Her friend Dori, is a spy.  Together they become part of a team searching for Nazi officer criminals. They communicate with each other through recipes which they decode.
This book takes you on a journey in Germany where war has left it's mark with devastation, shortages of food, heat, and clothing.  Children in need of shoes who are hungry in the schools that Edith supervises.  She is a very good, kind hearted person who sticks to her guns and will generally get what she needs to help her people.  
Beautifully written with attention to detail the author brings to life all the characters in her story to a point where you are vested in their mission and their lives. This book is released on July 7th 2020 and I would definitely put it on your TBR list, it will not disappoint.

Thank you to #netgalley and #WilliamMorrow for an ARC of this book.

In Germany, the war may be over, but questions linger. This is a story of spies and the allegiance of individuals. A good read.

This is a suspenseful historical novel set in Germany in 1946. A British woman, Edith Graham, is sent to Lubeck to help resurrect German schools devastated by the war. She is also involved as a spy, entangled with British and American agents either trying to recruit Nazis for their knowledge or to bring them to justice for their war crimes. Edith uses recipes she gathers to encode messages to send back home. There is much well-researched, atmospheric information about Germany’s condition after the war and the horrors that went on during it. There is a devastating twist toward the end of the novel. This well-written work is highly recommended.

This book was a very good read. Was a little hard for me to follow at first but it made sense at the end and all tied together quite nicely! The characters were likable and it got to a point where i didn't want to stop reading I wanted to see what happened next

The premise of this book is what drew me to it.  The idea of transmitting classified information through recipes seemed original and intriguing.  Hence, I appreciated that each chapter began with a recipe.  The descriptions of the food were fun.  It might have been nice to understand the code a bit more, though.

Edith was sweet, and the way she cared so much about helping others made her easy to root for.  I found her work with the school system interesting, though there wasn't a lot of it that made it into the story.

Probably the best thing about the book is the way the author captured time and place.  I really felt transported to post-war Europe.

There were a couple things I wasn't especially fond of.  Edith's understanding of the word 'secret', for one.  She tells her friends she can't talk about her assignment because she signed the Official Secrets Act, and they scoff at her hesitancy to speak stating that everyone has signed that.  Their dismissiveness combined with the thought that they'll just keep pressing her is enough to get her to talk.  Later she tries to think of ways to share information about her work with her reporter friend.  I was scratching my head about that.

Another thing that didn't sit quite right with me was that she got only a vague description of her assignment from Leo and no training or anything.  Still, he and the contact she was given seemed to expect a lot from her.

There were some things near the end that didn't make sense to me, why certain things were done, why other things were allowed.  It soured the last part for me.  Ultimately, I did not feel fulfilled when I finished this.  Still, it was an interesting concept, and many looking for a book connected to WWII but told from a different angle will probably enjoy it.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Book Club Girls for this early read.

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook is a richly detailed, haunting and heartbreaking novel of a teacher turned reluctant spy in 1946 post WW II Germany. 

Edith Graham spent the entirety of the war on her home soil of England, taking care of her parents and educating young women. When the war ends and she learns of an opportunity to travel to Germany as part of efforts to help rebuild the German society, she jumps at the chance, and is quickly recruited by both her cousin who works in intelligence of British government and by a friend for a more clandestine organization to spy for them, hoping to track down and old lover of hers who became a high ranking SS officer during the war. In order to keep the British government from recruiting her former flame she codes her messages to an organization working to bring SS officers to justice in the Nuremburg trials as recipes and menus. 

This point is exceptional in it's description of the bleakness of post war life, and in tackling how to know who one can and cannot trust. 

There are some threads of the story that never get fully resolved and initially when I completed the book this was a drawback, but after further reflection I see it is part of the reality and beauty of the book. We don't get all the answers and had everything been wrapped up neatly it would have been a rather trite ending.

I received an advanced copy of Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook. I have read a good amount of historical fiction, especially World War II era, so I was excited to check this out. I liked the premise—Postwar Europe was a mess with 4 competing powers trying to do things their way and the characters in this book were involved in trying to find Nazis in Postwar Germany. Overall I enjoyed the story itself but I do have two complaints: 1) The characters were a little hard to follow. There were a bunch and keeping track of who was from which country was a bit confusing. 2) I understand that the cookbook thing was used as a code but I don’t feel like it was really explained, especially since each chapter started with a recipe. Since it’s important to the story and a part of the title, I would have liked a little more explanation Or maybe an example of how they used it. I did enjoy the book and the main characters and what they were trying to do in the postwar era.

Edith Graham is a young Englishwoman who spent WW2 at home, teaching school and looking after her mother.  Once the war ended, though, she decides to try to do something important.  She volunteers to go to Germany to set up schools intended to help feed and educate children—and set them on a democratic path.

Because Edith is fluent in German, she is quickly hired.  Just as quickly, she is asked by British intelligence to be on the lookout for Nazis hiding out, especially her 1930s Oxford lover, Kurt von Stavenow.  Kurt became a doctor and SS man, involved in horrific crimes in the name of science.

Edith learns that there are several people who want to find Kurt, and their reasons vary.  She becomes close to a Jewish man who wants to ensure Nazis cannot slip away into new lives.  Edith’s friend Dori, a former behind-enemy-lines agent for Britain’s SOE, believes Kurt has the answer to the fate of four of her sister agents.  On the other end of the spectrum, though, there are British and American agents who want to scoop Kurt up, along with other Nazis with science backgrounds, and use them to help develop weapons for the coming Cold War.

Edith’s trip through Germany and move to the Baltic city of Lubeck are eye-opening.  Cities are in ruins, near-starving displaced persons are everywhere, black markets thrive, and figuring out who is and who isn’t a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer is a challenge.  Edith’s search for Kurt soon puts her in danger, and the story ratchets up the tension until the final thrilling pursuit and twisty ending.

Thinking over the novel after I read it, I had to acknowledge that it has a number of flaws.  Edith receives no intelligence training before being sent to Germany.  She does almost nothing to maintain her school administrator cover.  Edith seems to stumble, improbably, across every kind of war criminal, conspirator and grifter within days of her arrival in Germany.  Some of the Nazi types she encounters come close to being B-movie caricatures.  The recipe code she has worked out with Dori seems unlikely to convey the kind of detailed information it is claimed to do.  

And yet Rees’s storytelling lifts the book above my after-the-fact quibbles.  While I was reading I was fully engaged, feeling it was just a crackerjack espionage story.  Despite the cozy-sounding title, it has a hard-boiled manner that suits the story perfectly.  I definitely recommend it, especially if you’re interested in female-centric espionage novels.

I received a digital review copy from HarperCollins, via Netgalley.

There is no tidy end to war, there are always questions left to answer, lives to mourn, and societies to reassemble. Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook takes the reader back to 1946 with a young woman named Edith Graham. After spending her war years taking care of her mother and teaching at a girls school in England, Edith is looking for a way to contribute to the postwar effort. She signs up to serve as an Education Officer in the Control Commission for Germany, the British occupying civilian force. Her distant cousin Leo sees an opportunity to use Edith’s position as a cover for intelligence work, and he’s not the only one. Edith’s ex-boyfriend, Kurt von Stavenow was a dedicated Nazi, and now a number of groups have pinned their hopes of finding him on Edith. 

The recipes at the beginning of each chapter take a bit of getting used to, but once I settled into the story I enjoyed finding how each recipe fit into the narrative. Until that point, I just had to plow through and trust there was a purpose for what seemed like a strange choice. Other plot and story details that I enjoyed veer too far into spoiler territory for me to comment on them. I recommend this book for fans of Kate Quinn’s Alice Network and The Huntress. 

I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.

A very good book with really interesting characters taking place in Germany after the war. Spies, Nazis, and food a great combination.

What a delight! I was hoping this book would be similar to Kate Atkinson’s Transcription. The paths each author took were different but the stores had a similar feel. Edith, an average young  English woman, is recruited to help locate Nazis in post-WW2 Germany. She devises a way to send messages to her handler hidden in recipes.
This novel will appeal to historical fiction lovers and readers who root for surprising heroines.