Leaving Berlin

By Joseph Kanon

Book Overview

New York Times Notable Book * Named one of NPR and Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year *

The acclaimed author of The Good German "deftly captures the ambience" (The New York Times Book Review) of postwar East Berlin in his "thought-provoking, pulse-pounding" (Wall Street Journal) New York Times bestseller--a sweeping spy thriller about a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation.

Berlin, 1948. Almost four years after the war's end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors.

Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment--to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? At betrayal? Survival? Murder? Joseph Kanon's compelling thriller is a love story that brilliantly brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1476704651
• ISBN13: 9781476704654
• Release Date: March 2016
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Battleground Berlin, Cold War Style.

I don't what it is with this Author, I was ready to put this down, but after nearly 200 pages, what was the point??? Then it got good, real good. I got sucked in and couldn't let go. Glad that I did because the payoff I didn't see coming. My first of Joseph Kanon's books was The Good German, and that started out for me the same as this one, and then it hooked me in. Between the Berlin Airlift and the return of the Germans who had left before the War only to return to the East side of Berlin, I have further reading to look into.