#josephkanon

[jennblogsbooks]

It’s finally FriYAY! Do you have any fun plans for the weekend? I’m hoping to relax a bunch and catch a show in the city on Sunday 😌 . 🕵🏻‍♂️ . I just finished binge watching season 2 of Jack Ryan last night. I am totally obsessed and so disappointed that I watched the new season so fast 😩 . 🕵🏻‍♂️ . Thank you to @atriabooks { #partner } for sending me a copy of THE ACCOMPLICE by Joseph Kanon. This book sounds so similar to season 2 of Jack Ryan so I’m hoping it helps get me over my show hangover 🙌🏼 . 🕵🏻‍♂️ . Summary: . Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, Max Weill has never forgotten the atrocities he saw as a prisoner at Auschwitz—nor the face of Dr. Otto Schramm, a camp doctor who worked with Mengele on appalling experiments and who sent Max’s family to the gas chambers. As the war came to a close, Schramm was one of the many high-ranking former-Nazi officers who managed to escape Germany for new lives in South America, where leaders like Argentina’s Juan Perón gave them safe harbor and new identities. With his life nearing its end, Max asks his nephew Aaron Wiley—an American CIA desk analyst—to complete the task Max never could: to track down Otto in Argentina, capture him, and bring him back to Germany to stand trial. Unable to deny Max, Aaron travels to Buenos Aires and discovers a city where Nazis thrive in plain sight, mingling with Argentine high society. He ingratiates himself with Otto’s alluring but wounded daughter, whom he’s convinced is hiding her father. Enlisting the help of a German newspaper reporter, an Israeli agent, and the obliging CIA station chief in Buenos Aires, he hunts for Otto—a complicated monster, unexpectedly human but still capable of murder if cornered. Unable to distinguish allies from enemies, Aaron will ultimately have to discover not only Otto, but the boundaries of his own personal morality, how far he is prepared to go to render justice. . 🕵🏻‍♂️ . #theaccomplice #atriabooks #josephkanon #shelfie #historicalthriller #historicalmystery #readinglife #jennblogsbooks #booksharks #bookthrills #bookstababe #iambookish #wordaddict #bookstapic #bookishlady #mustreadbooks #thrillingreads https://www.instagram.com/p/B4nwCF1FE46/?igshid=1w6a0sqyvwbus

[alechediac]

Vamos para mais uma aventura #passagemdeistambul #josephkanon #livros #book

[overdrivebookbytes]

Reviewing Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon

My grandfather fought in the European Theater in World War II, and other than a few stories that he told me what I was a child, he was famously close-lipped about the entire experience. I don’t know if it is his connection to the war or my own love of history, but I can always be pulled into a book about WWII. When I heard that Joseph Kanon was writing a new book about that time period, I knew that I wanted to be one of the first to read it (I was completely infatuated with his previous book, Istanbul Passage and read almost the entire thing in one sitting). What Kanon gives us in his new novel Leaving Berlin is a story not of the height of the war, rather a political thriller situated around a newly divided Germany and Berlin under the power of the Soviet State.

Many, many books are written about the horrors WWII and the worrisome actions that lead up to it, but not as many cover the early reconstruction after, with even fewer discussing what was going on in the East, behind the Iron Curtain. Kanon has developed a niche for writing amazingly detailed post-WWII novels that show the reader a time and a place that many do not know.

In Leaving Berlin, Kanon introduces us to Alex Meier, a former exile from Berlin, returned to find the city much the same as it is completely different. Alex was a successful young writer before the war started, but was lucky enough to escape, as his Jewish heritage would have been a death sentence under the Nazis, as it was for his parents. He spent the entirety of the war in California, where he married and had a son. However, his past in Berlin, especially his memories of his first love, Irene, stayed with him always, and when his socialist past comes to haunt him in McCarthy-era U.S., he makes a deal with the C.I.A. to clear his name in exchange for returning to East Berlin to spy on the Soviets.

What Kanon gives us in this novel is a classic political suspense, full of car chases, double agents, secret rendezvous, and all of the tensions that surround the accidental spy. Alex is surprisingly suited for espionage, even as every choice he makes takes him deeper and deeper down the morality rabbit hole. The book is heavy with dialog over descriptions, but that moves the action along at a frenetic pace. So much happens throughout the story that it is difficult to remember everything happens in just a short period of days. Kanon really shines at showing the struggles between native Berliners and their new Soviet occupiers, as they try to adjust to their new leadership. The descriptions of German POWs (both soldiers and civilians) are eye opening, and add to the bleak landscape of this unsure time.

This novel will keep you flipping pages at a frenetic pace, as the characters become more and more entangled in places they should not be. Loyalties and friendships are tested, as memories of a past Berlin collide with the realities of the present. This is a story for anyone who enjoys a good spy story or history, written with a deftness and humanity that only Kanon can achieve.

Meghan Volchko is a Collection Development Analyst at OverDrive, and she has forgotten almost all of the German her Pappy taught her.

[atriabooks-blog]

Happy publication day to our wonderful authors and their books! Joseph Kanon author for LEAVING BERLIN Posie Graeme-Evans for WILD WOOD Maria Celeste for SELENA'S SECRET (also available in Spanish!)