num_pages: 371
description: 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 wars 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 cross-hairs 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 Kanons compelling thriller is a love story that brilliantly brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.
language: English
title: Leaving Berlin
publisher: Simon & Shuster