The Good German » (Movie Tie-In)

JOSEPH KANON is the author of three previous novels, The Good German, Los Alamos and The Prodigal Spy. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a book publishing executive. He lives in New York City.

The bestselling author of Los Alamos and Alibi returns to 1945. Hitler has been defeated, and Berlin is divided into zones of occupation. Jake Geismar, an American correspondent who spent time in the city before the war, has returned to write about the Allied triumph while pursuing a more personal quest: his search for Lena, the married woman he left behind. When an American soldier's body is found in the Russian zone during the Potsdam Conference, Jake stumbles on the lead to a murder mystery. The Good German is a story of espionage and love, an extraordinary re-creation of a city devastated by war, and a thriller that asks the most profound ethical questions in its exploration of the nature of justice, and what we mean by good and evil in times of peace and of war.

"[Joseph Kanon] is fast approaching the complexity and relevance not just of le Carré and Greene but even of Orwell: provocative, fully realized fiction that explores, as only fiction can, the reality of history as it is lived by individual men and women."

—The New York Times Book Review

"The kind of book that reads so easily that it's almost impossible to put down once you've started it."

—The Baltimore Sun

"Kanon is as ambitious a novelist as he is a gifted one."

—The Washington Post

Los Angeles Times - Ken Ringle

Scores of Cold War thrillers have set out to walk the same teleological territory, but few have done so as compellingly and as searchingly as The Good German. Kanon demonstrates an eerie mastery of the evocative historical detail. His Berlin is both a tree-shaded prewar memory and a bomb-blasted postwar hellscape where mile upon mile of burned-out buildings gape skyward like decayed teeth. You can feel the shattered glass crunching beneath your feet as you read.