Leaving Berlin

A Novel

By: Joseph Kanon

Narrated by: Corey Brill

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.

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? Betrayal? Survival? Murder?

Filled 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.

©2015 Joseph Kanon (P)2015 Simon and Schuster

Wonderfully complex!

I loved this book! Intriguing, complicated, well-plotted, well-written and well-read. Set in a time period I knew little about, the Berlin airlift, the book demonstrates the warring factions within oneself, as well as the warring factions in the political manuevering that followed WWII in Germany. As the reviewer for The (London) Telegraph put it, " One knows that a war will end some day: but what if peace entails unending misery?" And who chooses known "misery" over the chance of a new and peaceful life? The narrator is grand--an interesting voice, moving easily between hints of the appropriate accents of various characters. Good, good listen--highly recommended!

Well-crafted spy thriller

If Agatha Christie wrote a spy novel, this is what she would have written. Excellent writing, spacing, and narration. You think you know where you're going, and are jerked in a skidding spin. Indeed, all the way to the last paragraph.

this book is a old fashioned spy novel

ho hum. not earth-shattering and 1 wonders what the author was trying to say on a deeper level.

Decent story, but the narration needs a lot of work.

The story was fairly good, and seemed to be historically accurate for the most part, but the narrator tries to make his voice sound feminine when speaking for female characters, and it grates the ears like a fork scraping a chalkboard. Other than that though, he is a decent narrator.

Dark Dark Dark

I enjoyed this Cold War, spy novel, but don't go into it expecting a whole lot of happy things to happen. Still, it's well written and there are enough surprising twist to keep you interested.

Fast

The book was written very well, the dialogue being the best part. I could feel the conversation between characters. I wish the book were longer, or more built around the espionage factor, but that's only personal preference. A good read, for anyone into spy, or post WWII era Germany.

Birth of the East German surveillance state

This is a spy thriller that has emphasis on the political currents of its time, unlike others that try to emphasize the universality of spy-vs-spy. Embodied in it’s protagonist’s resume is a history of everything corrupt and hypocritical prior to the Berlin airlift. It is a masterpiece of set and setting with a remarkably thin present tense that unfortunately sets a tiny hollowness at its core. On the other hand this hollowness is completely correct for the Cold War era of thrillers; a grace note that is a hallmark of the genre. We are meant to feel it as we divided the world in half and left dark legacies to fester. Alex is perfect as an amateur press-ganged into service for his political fidelity (socialist) in red-baited America. He’s the perfect mark for the clandestine US services. His family, his friends, his enemies all useful to them just like the Stazi. But at some point our protagonist must see the game as it’s played or be sacrificed. On the way we’re reminded how the allies too were corrupt and complicit to the wound that was the partition of the German state.

Good story, but narrator mispronounces lots of basic german words/places

Interesting concept, but why can’t they get a narrator that can pronounce basic german words? Seems like that should’ve been the easy part... distracts from the story at times

Somewhat complicated

I really like to listen to books about WWII - and I would recommend this book. I did get a bit lost figuring out which side everyone was on - but overall a good listen.

To many twists to count

This book will leave you thinking of what might have been! You will not know till the end what could have been! You will fall in love with one character and loath another almost as though you knew them personally!