Leaving berlin - Joseph Kanon

New York Times Notable Book * NPR Best Books 2015 * Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2015 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.