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. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors.
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. New York Times Notable Book * NPR Best Books 2015 * Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2015 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.
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