Leaving Berlin: A Novel Audiobook (Free)

New York Times Notable Publication * NPR Best Books 2015 * Wall structure Street Journal Best Books of 2015

The acclaimed author of THE NICE German “deftly captures the ambience” (The New York Times Publication Review) of postwar East Berlin in his “thought-provoking, pulse-pounding” (Wall Street Journal) NY Times bestseller-a sweeping spy thriller about a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation.

Berlin, 1948. Almost four years after the war’s end, the town continues to be about Leaving Berlin: A Book in ruins, a physical wasteland and a politics symbol going to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded town is barely making it through on airlifted products; in the East, the heady start of political reconstruction are getting undermined from the murky compromises from the Cool War. Espionage, just like the black market, is an undeniable fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals becoming lured back from exile to add credibility towards the competing sectors.

Alex Meier, a young Jewish article writer, fled the Nazis for America prior to the war. But the politics of his youngsters have now place him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the increased loss of his family members, he makes a eager bargain using the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his indigenous Berlin. But almost right away things move fatally incorrect. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is normally wiped out, and Alex finds himself a needed man. Even worse, he discovers his actual assignment-to spy on the girl he left behind, the only girl he provides ever cherished. Changing edges in Berlin is really as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we attract the lines of our moral boundaries? At betrayal? Success? Murder? Joseph Kanon’s compelling thriller can be a love tale that brilliantly brings a shadowy amount of background vividly alive.