This reading group guide for Leaving Berlin includes an introduction, discussion questions and ideas for enhancing your book club. 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. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. Worse, he discovers his real assignment-to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved.

A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. 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 the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors.Īlex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. 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. Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. 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.īerlin, 1948. New York Times Notable Book * Named one of NPR and Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year *

Leaving berlin novel