When you see a title for a book like Joseph Kanon’s Leaving Berlin, you would easily be forgiven for automatically thinking it must be set during either the First or the Second World War, but as with the rest of the storyline, everything is subtly not what it seems. It’s the latest spy novel from the American author who’s previous work includes The Good German, which was adapted into a movie in 2006, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, so expectations are high for the potential of his latest thriller.
The hardback release date was on Thursday the 6th of November 2014, which made it a good shout for a wintery espionage read in the run up to Christmas 2014 when it first hit the shelves, but it’s one that could easily be read throughout the year. The paperback edition of the book will be hitting the shelves in August 2015, making it a possible late summer read and you can check out our Leaving Berlin review to help you decide whether or not to add it to your reading list.
The story itself is set in 1948, just a few years after the end of the Second World War as Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer who managed to get out of Nazi Germany before the war, finds himself being sent back to Berlin once again. Having fled to America, Meier had thought he’d left his home country behind and started a new life in the States, but his past political allegiances bring him under the scrutiny of the precursor investigations that went on to become the McCarthy witch-hunts. In a bid to to escape deportation and the prospect of losing his young family in the process, he’s forced to make an arrangement with the CIA, which had been created just a year beforehand, going back to Berlin to act as one of their agents in the divided capital city.
However, his very first assignment goes terribly wrong and he suddenly becomes a wanted man as the East hunt him down for the death of one of their own agents. Things get even more fraught for the family man when he finds out that the real reason he’s been sent to Berlin is to spy on his former lover, a women he still loves. With conflicts of interest and loyalties to face, will Alex find a way of leaving Berlin without losing everything that he’s worked so hard to protect.
For anyone not up on their history, the book is set in a tumultuous time in terms of world politics with the Cold War just beginning and the resulting espionage activity that developed between the East and West. While McCarthyism didn’t really start in earnest until 1950, when Senator McCarthy made his infamous speech that went on to create a series of witch hunts for American “Commies”, Leaving Berlin takes place during the build up to the onslaught, so it’s an interesting time frame to be set in.
The book is Joseph Kanon’s sixth spy novel, following up on Los Alamos, The Good German, The Prodigal Spy, Alibi and Istanbul Passage. Impressively, he’s been compared with the likes of Graham Green and John le Carré, so Leaving Berlin had all the hallmarks of being a classic espionage thriller. It turned out to be just that and we’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get picked up as a movie before too long.
