International Writers Inspiring Change featured book: Beelitz-Heilstätten: Where Ghosts Never Die, by Marina Osipova

Secrets never stay secrets forever!

What if rediscovering your birthplace unearthed a secret so powerful it could rewrite history—and your own identity?

A Russian-American writer obsessed with her birthplace - a ghostly derelict German military hospital near Berlin

Her Austrian husband, who pines for the father he never met

A passionate young doctor destined for darkness

A demonic figure who changed the course of history

Interrogation reports stolen from the Soviet secret police

What mysterious force connects them all?

This genre-bending time-slip narrative bridges 2018 to the haunting eras of WWI and WWII, interweaving together the ghosts of history and a shocking secret that threatens the present.

Our review of Beelitz -Heilstätten: Where Ghosts Never Die

Beelitz-Heilstätten: Where Ghosts Never Die, by Marina Osipova, is historical fiction, but it is also a psychological thriller, a romance and a time-bending paranormal experience, all packaged up in one very-well written story. It is gripping and fascinating, drawing the reader through two time dimensions, as the story, which starts in the present, casts one back to 1918, Germany, to a hospital called Beelitz-Heilstätten. It would be a great disservice to future readers to attempt to describe the plot-line, so I will not bother. This book is incredibly rich in its descriptive detail. The author goes to great lengths to make the ambience tangible and perceptible. The picture she paints lingers, like haunting shadows lurking in the recesses of your mind. The historical aspect of this story, cleverly weaved into the story-line, makes it both believable, and horrifying as Osipova opens yet another door which reveals the flagrant brutality and inhumanity of the NAZIs during WWII. This is one of her great hallmarks as an author - she pulls no punches, and her stories remind us that war brings out the very worst of humanity. The thread, like a spider's web or gossamer, inexorably draws the main character, and the reader, to a place and time, in search of the truth - a truth that seems to echo and beckon her from the past, and what she discovers and the decisions she must make with that truth ... well, you'll just have to read it. We gave it a well-deserved 5 star rating.

Reviewed by International Writers Inspiring Change

Marina Osipova

Marina Osipova was born in East Germany into a military family and grew up in Russia, where she graduated from the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives. When she was five, she decided she wanted to speak German and, years later, she earned a diploma as a German language translator from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages. In Russia, she worked first in a scientific-technical institute as a translator, then in a Government Ministry in the office of international relations, later for some Austrian firms. For many years, she lived in New York, working in a law firm, and then in Austria for several years. In the spring of 2022, after spending ten months in Russia, some unfortunate world events brought her back to the United States.

A long-standing member of the Historical Novel Society, she is dedicated to writing historical fiction, especially related to WWII. Her books garnered numerous literary awards, including a 1st Place WINNER of the 2021 Hemingway Book Awards novel competition for 20th Century Wartime Fiction (a division of the Chanticleer International Book Awards). At some point or another, all her books hit the Amazon Top 100 lists in Historical Russian Fiction and Historical German Fiction and How Dare the Birds Sing even #1 or #2 in War Fiction in Canada, the UK, and Australia.

Her readers praise her books for “emotional realism,” for “taking on a subject that few authors have touched,” for “writing with heart and compassion while not holding back from hard cold realities of war,” for “giving an authentic and in-depth look at a culture that tends to baffle westerners.”

Author website