New York Situations Notable Publication * 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 Publication Review) of postwar East Berlin in his “thought-provoking, pulse-pounding” (Wall Street Journal) New York Times bestseller-a sweeping spy thriller in regards to a city caught between political idealism as well as the harsh realities of Soviet occupation.

Berlin, 1948. Nearly four years after the war’s end, the city continues to be about Departing Berlin: A Novel in ruins, a physical wasteland and a politics symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely making it through on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are getting undermined from the murky compromises from the Cool War. Espionage, just like the black market, is a fact of lifestyle. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals getting lured back again from exile to include credibility towards the competing sectors.

Alex Meier, a Jewish article writer, fled the Nazis for America prior to the war. However the politics of his youth have now place him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Confronted 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 indigenous Berlin. But almost right away things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is usually wiped out, and Alex discovers himself a wished man. Even worse, he discovers his genuine assignment-to spy on the girl he left out, the only girl he offers ever loved. Changing edges in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector boundary. But where perform we pull the lines of our moral boundaries? At betrayal? Survival? Murder? Joseph Kanon’s compelling thriller is a love tale that brilliantly brings a shadowy period of background vividly to life.