Leaving Berlin (Paperback)

The streets, at least, had been cleared but were still lined on either side with piles of bricks and smashed porcelain and twisted metal. Even the smell of bombing, the burned wood and the sour lime of broken cement, was still in the air. But maybe, like the airlift planes, you didn’t notice after a while.

From the author of The Good German comes a sweeping novel set in post-war Berlin.

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 crosshairs 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.

Filled with intrigue and the moral ambiguity of conflicted loyalties, Leaving Berlin is a masterful thriller and a love story that brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.

‘Kanon has a very distinctive style, employing staccato prose and elliptical dialogue that conveys information as quickly as possible so that the story hares along… The novel is hugely exciting, and just as heart-breaking.’ – The Telegraph