This is the first Joseph Kanon book I’ve read and his writing style took me a little bit of getting used to. Kanon weaves actual historical figures into the story such as playwright Berthold Brecht and his wife the actress Helene Weigel and from his descriptions you can really tell he’s done his research. He also details the claustrophobic life of those living in what was then called the Soviet Zone (later East Germany/GDR) and the Faustian pacts they make to just live and stay on the right side of the eastern authorities. Kanon evocatively describes a Berlin where the sector borders are still porous, abduction is commonplace and the inhabitants are still trying to put their lives back together after the war. The book dives straight into the action and doesn’t really pause for breath throughout. In order to stay in the US he makes a deal with the CIA to be their agent in his native Berlin.

I am a great fan of what some call “Berlin Noir” and in this book you can almost taste the grit and smell the grime of post war Berlin.Īlex Meier’s politics have put him at the forefront of the US communist witch-hunts. If you are a fan of Alan Furst, David Downing, Rebecca Cantrell or Jonathan Rabb then this is definitely for you. Joseph Kanon’s compelling thriller is a love story that brilliantly brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? At betrayal? Survival? Murder? 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 cross-hairs 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. A sweeping spy thriller about a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation.īerlin, 1948.

Leaving berlin book review