I saw author Greg Iles at a book signing and he said this author, Joseph Kanon, is one of his favorites and that's why I bought this book. He felt like he owed a debt to the person who helped him get out and he wanted to see if he could help that family. The protagonist was half Jewish, whose parents died in a concentration camp, but he was able to get out of Germany in 1933. The wall wasn't yet built and many Germans were hoping the Russians would go home. But there were all kinds of people returning to Germany trying to find relatives, friends and an old way of life. I believe a lot of them found out that it was one thing to be an intellectual communist living in the US and another to live under the yoke of Soviet communism. This was the time of the McCarthy communist purge in the US and many Americans that were communist or at least sympathetic were returning or going to East Berlin and the Soviet sector. Set in Berlin in 1948 and it seems like the war is still ongoing. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? Betrayal? Survival? Murder?įilled with intrigue and the moral ambiguity of conflicted loyalties, Joseph Kanon's new novel is a compelling thriller and a love story that brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. Worse, he discovers his real assignment: to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. 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 the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch hunts. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors.Īlex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. 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. Almost four years after the war's end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture.

From the best-selling author of Istanbul Passage - called a 'fast-moving thinking man's thriller' by The Wall Street Journal - comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation.īerlin, 1948.

Leaving berlin book review