“Absolutely heartbreaking… Gripped me from the first page and I read it in one sitting!… Will stay with me for a long time.” Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

1942, Czechoslovakia: Gently, she lowered the sleeping infant, swaddled in blankets, down into the tiny, dark space and carefully replaced the wooden floorboards. As she stepped back, she heard the slamming of doors, voices shouting in German and the sound of dogs beginning to bark…

When the Gestapo arrive to arrest Magda’s kind, Jewish employers—clever Dr Tauber and his talented wife—she has only moments to save their tiny new-born son Samuel by placing him in a makeshift hiding place beneath the floor in her room.

With the Taubers gone, their alpine villa is taken over by a brutal Nazi commander, who is determined to hunt down Resistance fighters in the mountains. Trapped in the house, Magda manages to get Samuel into hiding with her friends in the Resistance. Magda supports the cause, passing coded messages about the commander and smuggling much-needed supplies to their secret network.

Magda is playing a dangerous game and it isn’t only her life on the line. And she will need to risk more than she ever thought possible to keep Samuel safe...

A heart-breaking wartime epic of love, bravery, survival and one young woman’s exceptional courage, set against the backdrop of wild and beautiful forests and mountains. Perfect for fans of My Name is Eva, The Alice Network and The German Midwife, this novel will stay with you long after you have turned the final page.

“I am stunned by the sad beauty. I feel like I've gotten a present. That's how I feel after reading a really brilliant book or story.” – Marina Osipova, How Dare the Birds Sing

Kiev. 1942. Larissa is a renowned embroiderer, surviving in occupied Ukraine as a seamstress in her ruin of a workshop. When an SS officer arrives to order a traditionally embroidered Ukrainian shirt, Larissa uses the opportunity to create a piece of art from her handiwork. Threading together the history and the horrors between the two enemies, she finds a way to express her defiance toward the Nazis and the local collaborators. But at what price?

Prepare yourself for an unforgettable journey behind the Second World War’s eastern front. Six short stories, based on the author’s family's true accounts, will put you alongside painters and poets, partisans and dissidents, as they navigate through Ukraine’s war-torn landscape on a harrowing escape from tyranny.

Souvenirs from Kiev was awarded 2nd Place in the 2014 HNS International Short Story Award and the collection won the silver medal in the IPPY Book Awards 2020 for Military and Wartime fiction.

Pride goes before the fall.
1900s Austrian Tyrol. Fritz Hanny, confident and optimistic, enjoys the prestige of belonging to one of the most respected families in the Reschen Valley. When he falls in love with Cecilia, a young girl in a neighboring village, he is certain he has found his purpose in life. Already on his way to making his own fortune, Fritz pursues Cecilia only to be cut down by one external force after another. Disappointment, violence, and conflict turn Fritz into a desperate man. When the Great War ends, Fritz is trapped between two borders: on one side, the family he has. On the other, the family he wants. This is a stand-alone novella and a prequel to NO MAN'S LAND, the first book in the Reschen Valley series.
"Lucyk-Berger has explored the darker side of human nature in this tale, and she has done so with great skill and splendour. This story appalled, impressed, and fascinated in equal measures. It is wonderfully told and impossible to put down." - Mary Anne Yarde, Coffee Pot Book Club blogger

It's a dangerous time to be a dissident...


1938. Northern Italy. Since saving Angelo Grimani's life 18 years earlier, Katharina is grappling with how their lives have since been entwined. As construction on the Reschen lake reservoir begins, the Reschen Valley community is torn apart into two fronts - those who want to stay no matter what comes, and those who hold out hope that Hitler will bring Tyrol back into the fold.

Back in Bolzano, Angelo finds one fascist politician who may have the power to help Katharina and her community, but there is a group of corrupt players eager to have a piece of him. When they realise that Angelo and Katharina are joining forces, they turn to a strategy of conquering and dividing to weaken both the community and Angelo's efforts.

Meanwhile, the daughter Angelo shares with Katharina - Annamarie - has fled to Austria to pursue her acting career but the past she is running away from lands her directly into the arms of a new adversary: the Nazis. She goes as far as Berlin, and as far as Goebbels, to pursue her dreams, only to realise that Germany is darker than any place she's been before.

Angelo puts aside his prejudices and seeks alliances with old enemies; Katharina finds ingenious ways to preserve what is left of her community, and Annamarie wrests herself from the black forces of Nazism with plans to return home. But when Hitler and Mussolini present the Tyroleans with “The Option”, the residents are forced to choose between Italian and German nationhood with no guarantee that they will be able to stay in Tyrol at all!

Angelo, Katharina and Annamarie are trapped on separate fronts, forced to take a stand, but their enemies lurk where they thought was safest. Out of the ruins of war, will they be able to find their way back to one another and pick up the pieces?

This blockbuster finale will keep readers glued to the pages. Early readers are calling it, "...engrossing", "...enlightening" and "...both a heartbreaking and uplifting end to this incredible series!"

In the process of understanding who she was, she discovered who she was not.

1937. Northern Italy. New international conflicts loom on the horizon, and Italy must feed its war machine. Angelo Grimani has a plan to keep the Reschen Valley reservoir out of his father’s hands but he needs a local front to succeed. He faces his past and seeks an alliance with Katharina Steinhauser. But when he sees Annamarie, Katharina's daughter, for the first time, Angelo realizes he faces an altogether different conflict.

Unaware of the history between Angelo and Katharina, Annamarie is convinced her future lies beyond the confines of the valley. When an Italian delegation arrives to assess the reservoir, Annamarie believes she has found her ticket out…in the form of Angelo’s son and a Fascist uniform. When you cannot hide from the truth, where do you run?

Love, betrayal, and deception explode in this next instalment of the Reschen Valley. This is the third book in the series and can be picked up as a stand-alone.

Burying the past comes at a high price…

It’s 1922 and a year after the Italian Fascists marched on Bozen.

Nationalism in the Tyrolean Reschen Valley creates enemies out of old friends and Katharina Steinhauser fiercely protects the identity of her daughter’s father from both her family and her community.

Meanwhile, the Fascists have wrested control from the monarchy and momentum behind the Reschen Lake reservoir increases with plans to wipe out the Reschen Valley's towns and hamlets. Katharina risks writing to Angelo Grimani, the man in charge, and begs to have the project reassessed.

But Angelo is hemmed in by a force that steers him far from his dealings with the Reschen Valley and that which binds him to Katharina. It's the opportunity the Fascists have been waiting for.

Following No Man’s Land, The Breach is the second part in the Reschen Valley series. If you enjoy gripping historical fiction that won’t let you go, you will love Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger’s vivid saga. Buy or try now!

"An authentic, rich story." Laurel Busch
"Well-executed…powerful…moved me to my core.” Ann Howard Creel, The Uncertain Season

“…vivid and intriguing…transports you to another time and place.” Kristi Saare Duarte, The Transmigrant

“Utterly atmospheric. I could not put this down.” Louisa M. Bauman, Sword of Peace

A plan to flood her valley. A means to destroy her culture.1920, former Austrian Tyrol. Katharina Thaler faces becoming the first woman to ever own a farm in the Reschen Valley. The end of the Great War has taken more than her beloved family, it has robbed the province of its autonomy and severed it in half. As her countrymen fight to prevent the annexation to Italy, Katharina finds a wounded Italian engineer on her mountain. Her decision to save Angelo Grimani’s life, however, thrusts both into the midst of a new world order—a labyrinth of corruption, prejudice, and greed.

Trapped between a growing fascist regime and a man who threatens to tear her home away, Katharina must decide what to protect: love or country?

No Man’s Land is the first book in the Reschen Valley historical fiction series. If you enjoy gripping, historical fiction that will stay long after you've read the last chapter, you will love Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger’s vivid saga.

"An authentic, rich story." Laurel Busch, historical fiction editor and author

"Well-executed…powerful…moved me to my core.” Ann Howard Creel, The Whiskey Sea

"...vivid and intriguing...will have you mesmerized from page one." Kristi Saare Duarte, The Transmigrant

Lawrence Kraymer is a young entrepreneur from Philadelphia who takes a hunting trip up along the Delaware, and in the process, stumbles on Pierre Laux, a French aristocrat living on the edge of what was then a vast wilderness.

Intoxicated with this exotic family, Lawrence pursues an engagement with one of Pierre's daughters, and builds her a château in a misguided attempt to prove himself worthy. In doing so, he sets in motion a sequence of events that has tragic consequences in this literary treatment of an actual historical incident.

"A debut novel about two colonists in America whose lives become entwined during the early years of the 18th century . . . A haunting, eloquent, and engaging historical drama." -- Kirkus Reviews

BEYOND THE ELASTIC LIMIT advances beyond the limit of your imagination with a simple fable of good and evil, imbued with great love and bitter hatred, that weaves with epic proportions throughout the ever-expanding natural stages of normal social development. Amid this backdrop of sweeping external advancement lay those elemental, internal choices that all of us must make if we wish to live a life with true meaning and purpose. Here is a redemptive tale of good people forced to choose between bad options and what happens to them when they do experience these issues at the very core of humanity. Explore through both time and space the very stuff that makes us human and transcend your own conceptions to pass BEYOND THE ELASTIC LIMIT.

PIERCING the ELASTIC LIMIT, the second astounding EPIC FABLE from master storyteller HOWARD LORING, traces the determined actions of the mysterious but compelling ‘Old Man beyond the Portal,’ as he and his redheaded assistant pursue their secretive Mandate to rescue the imperiled planet’s future.A page turning quest spanning the ages, once more this elusive author employs the simple FABLE to reveal a vast and griping EPIC adventure through time and space, portraying with penetrating insight authentic lives of genuine historic figures including Aristocrat Julius Caesar, Writer Christopher Marlowe and Master Musician Robert Schumann, to name but a few.Filled with high intrigue and escalating excitement, this engaging EPIC FABLE surpasses the reader’s imagination yet again, transporting them into a formerly hidden and baffling realm of reality, all by PIERCING the ELASTIC LIMIT.

Not a sequel but a continuation, this third volume of the Elastic Limit series (2019 new edition) is a compilation of twelve intriguing short stories, all presented in Epic Fable form, that together convey the larger, hidden meaning of the elusive Elastic Limit of Time.

These new stand alone Epic Fables can be experienced in several different ways as any story can be read independently of the others, but reading the chapters forward in sequence tells the book’s full adventure while also connecting all three Elastic Limit volumes.

Yet, as Time is ephemeral, this book can also be read backward by starting with the last chapter and working forward as it’s the same account from either direction, which is entirely the whole point of Howard Loring's collective narratives concerning the mysterious Elastic Limit of Time.

As the first full-length novel in The White Sails Series, DISCERNING GRACE captures the spirit of an independent woman whose feminine lens blows the ordered patriarchal decks of a 19th century tall ship to smithereens.

Wilful Grace Baxter, will not marry old Lord Silverton with his salivary incontinence and dead-mouse stink. Discovering she is a pawn in an arrangement between slobbery Silverton and her calculating father, Grace is devastated when Silverton reveals his true callous nature.

Refusing this fate, Grace resolves to stow away. Heading to the docks, disguised as a lad to ease her escape, she encounters smooth-talking naval recruiter, Gilly, who lures her aboard HMS Discerning with promises of freedom and exploration in South America.

When Grace's big mouth lands her bare-bottomed over a cannon for insubordination, her identity is exposed. The captain wants her back in London but his orders, to chart the icy archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, forbid it. Lieutenant Seamus Fitzwilliam gallantly offers to take Grace off the fretting captain's hands by placing her under his protection.

Grace must now win over the crew she betrayed with her secret, while managing her feelings towards her taciturn protector, whose obstinate chivalry stifles her new-found independence. But when Grace disregards Lieutenant Fitzwilliam's warnings about the dangers of the unexplored archipelago, it costs a friend his life and she realises she is not as free as she believes.

DISCERNING GRACE is historical women's fiction that will appeal to fans of Claire Fraser from Outlander and Demelza Poldark from Poldark—in other words, fans of feisty historical female leads.