Carol J. Williams at Eagle Harbor Book Co.

Meet local author Carol J. Williams at Eagle Harbor Book Co. in Bainbridge Island, WA. She will be signing copies of her latest book, Dispatches from Berlin: Walls and Secrets.

As the Berlin Wall crumbles, two lives are unexpectedly connected by history’s fault lines. 

Veteran foreign correspondent Natalie Chester races into West Berlin on the night the Wall opens, expecting the story of a lifetime—crowds surging toward freedom, a superpower standoff dissolving in real time, a Cold War ending in celebration not bloodshed. Sidelined by her editor, she’s paired with David Schiller, a gifted but guarded American photographer who clearly wants nothing to do with her. When a faded place name in an East German guidebook points to the obscure village where David’s father was born—and disappeared—a routine assignment turns into a personal reckoning neither of them planned.

Dispatches from Berlin weaves political intrigue with intimate drama as two reporters navigate censorship, betrayal, and grief while trying to get the story right. In this second installment of the Iron Curtain Chronicles, Carol J. Williams offers readers a front-row seat to the end of the Cold War—and asks what it costs to tell the truth when the world finally starts to change.

Carol J. Williams is a retired foreign correspondent who covered the historic upheaval that ended the Cold War in an award-winning 35-year career with Associated Press and Los Angeles Times.