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From your best-selling author of Istanbul Passing - called a "fast-moving thinking man's thriller" by The Wall membrane Road Journal - comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city trapped between political idealism and the tough realities of Soviet profession. Berlin, 1948. Almost four years following the war's end, the location continues to be in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol going to rupture. In the West a defiant, blockaded city is scarcely surviving on airlifted resources; in the East the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Freezing Warfare. Espionage, like the black market, is an undeniable fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured again from exile to add credibility to the contending sectors. Alex Meier, a young Jewish copy writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. However the politics of his children have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch hunts. Confronted with deportation and the increased loss of his family, he makes a anxious deal with the fledgling CIA: He'll earn his way back to America by behaving as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is wiped out, and Alex confirms himself a required man. Worse, he discovers his real project: to spy on the girl he left out, the only girl he has ever loved. Changing edges in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector boundary. But where do we attract the lines in our moral restrictions? 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 history that brings a shadowy amount of history vividly alive.
