Dutton in New York, before he began writing in 1995.ġ997 - Los Alamos - Edgar Award for best first novelĢ001 - The Good German - adapted to film starring George Clooney and Cate BlanchettĢ005 - Alibi - Hammett Award (International Association of Crime Writers) Later he became editor in chief, CEO, and president of the publishing houses Houghton Mifflin and E. As an undergraduate, he published his first stories in the The Atlantic Monthly. Kanon was born in Pennsylvania and studied at Harvard University and at Trinity College in Cambridge.

Joseph Kanon is an American author, best known for thriller and spy novels set in the period immediately after World War II. Currently-lives in New York City, New York.

Education-Harvard University Cambridge University.

Where-in the state of Pennsylvania, USA.

But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? Betrayal? Survival? Murder?įilled 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. ( From the publisher.) 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. 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.īut almost from the start things go fatally wrong. 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.

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.Įspionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. From the bestselling 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.īerlin 1948.

Leaving berlin book