The West has responded with the Berlin Airlift, and the sight and sound of airplanes flying overhead is a constant reminder in Leaving Berlin of a growing Cold War tension that Meier can’t escape. At the same time, however, the Soviets are trying to force the Allies to leave by cutting off access to the food and coal necessary for the city’s very existence. Berliners can still travel between the Soviet, American, French, and British sectors. Meier is not the only literary exile returning to post-war Berlin Kanon includes two real-life figures-Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist poet and playwright, and the anti-Fascist writer Anna Seghers (the pseudonym adopted by Anna Reiling)-who have also decided to live under Communism in the hopes of building a new society, a Workers’ Paradise. But Meier has struck a secret, Faustian bargain with the CIA-in exchange for his eventual readmission to the U.S., where his twelve-year old son lives, he will spy on the Russians and their German Stalinist helpers. No longer welcome in America, Meier finds himself warmly welcomed by the Soviet authorities ruling Berlin.
The novel’s protagonist is Alex Meier, a German-Jewish author who has spent the Second World War in Hollywood but has now run afoul of Congressional investigators who want him to “name names,” which as a matter of principle he won’t. Kanon’s The Good German took place a few years earlier, in 1945 Berlin, and he has an affinity for the city and its culture (just as novelist Alan Furst does for Paris between the wars.) Leaving Berlin may be the most suspenseful of Joseph Kanon’s historical spy thrillers, a beautifully-crafted and evocative novel set in the ruins of 1949 East Berlin. Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon – TOP SPY NOVEL OF 2015
(Click for my list of 2014’s top spy thrillers and 2013’s top spy thrillers ). Please note that I’m partial to historical fiction about espionage that has a literary flair the novels I’ve selected reflect that bias. Some of these thrillers may make the bestseller lists, and others may prove to have a narrower reader appeal. Here are my picks for the best spy novels of 2015.