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.

Berlin 1948. Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. 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. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors.

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. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment—to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? Betrayal? Survival? Murder?

Filled 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.

约瑟夫•卡农（Joseph Kanon）

爱伦•坡奖得主，著有《德国好人》《伊斯坦布尔逃亡》《不在场证明》《星尘》等作品。其中，《德国好人》被改编为电影，由史蒂文•索德伯格执导，乔治•克鲁尼和凯特•布兰切特主演。1970年从哈佛毕业，在布朗出版社就任编辑；之后的几年，他加入普特南/科沃德•麦坎并成为总编辑。后来，他又跳槽至E.P.Dutton出版社出任总编辑及董事长。在米夫林出版集团度过了他最后的出版职业生涯，在职八年间，他担任集团的执行副总裁及贸易销售部门主管。在出版行业沉浮25余载，于1995年辞职，成为全职作家。