The Good German (Bestselling Backlist) - Softcover

Kanon, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312421265 ISBN 13: 9780312421267

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

Now a Major Motion Picture

The bestselling author of Los Alamos 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. Jason 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 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.

About this title

Review:

"[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

"As he did in Los Alamos, Kanon demonstrates an eerie mastery of the evocative historical detail....You can feel the shattered glass crunching beneath your feet as you read. You can smell the smoke-scorched broken bricks.... Kanon is as ambitious a novelist as he is a gifted one." --The Washington Post

"A terrific book...Kanon is the heir apparent to Graham Greene and early-and mid-passage le Carré, for he writes of moral quandaries that are real and not created to drive a plot....The multilayered story is beautifully told." --The Boston Globe

"Gripping...Kanon has written a tale about the untenable choices war entails, and about the moral dangers of demonization. For American readers, the book cuts to the bone, coming at a time when we have become the demonized and are doing our best to avoid becoming
the demonizers." --Newsday

Book Description:

July 1945. The Allies are posturing amongst the ruins of Berlin and marking out their territory for what will be the boundaries of the Cold War. And no German admits to being a Nazi, especially those whose skills can be sold to one side or the other.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312421265
• ISBN 13: 9780312421267
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 498