The Good German

Book excerpt: An American reporter uncovers a politically explosive murder in post-WWII Berlin in this acclaimed historical thriller—now a major motion picture. Berlin, 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. Joseph Kanon’s The Good German is a story of espionage and love, an extraordinary recreation of a city devastated by war, and a thriller that asks profound ethical questions about what we mean by good and evil in times of peace and of war. “[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