Here are 100 books that Leaving Berlin fans have personally recommended if you like
Leaving Berlin.
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I was a wild card in the industry heavy town where I was born and raised, destined to burn out my days early in a factory or steel mill. But I worked my way through college, survived several close calls in Vietnam and bull headed my way into a series of jobs that pushed me toward Hollywood assignments as a writer, producer and director.
I admire Hemingway’s measured empathy for the war-torn social outcast. This classic novel pictures a post-WWI environment where survivors have been physically and mentally maimed by their war experience; I like how Hemingway creates a vivid cast of characters struggling to find their way in a society that seems no better than before the conflict began.
Jake Barnes is a man whose war wound has made him unable to have sex—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Jake is an expatriate American journalist living in Paris, while Brett is a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair and numerous love affairs, and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on real people in Hemingway's circle, and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the…
In a previous career, I traveled extensively to many parts of the world. I always found new cultures, old traditions, strange languages, and exotic environments fascinating. Perhaps even more fascinating, were the expats I found who had traded in their home country for an existence far from where they were born and different from how they were reared. In many instances, I’ve attempted to incorporate—in Heinlein’s words—this stranger in a strange land motif in my work. It always seems to heighten my interest. I hope the reader’s as well.
Graham Greene is considered by many to be the acknowledged master of expat tales. This is actually one of his lesser-known novels. It tells the story of Querry, an internationally famous architect suffering from terminal ennui. Life no longer holds meaning for him, or even pleasure. He takes a boat up river in Africa to its last stop, a leper village in the Congo. There, he attempts to lose himself by helping the indigenous afflicted, and in so doing begins to cure his own ills as well. But fate and the white community can’t let well enough alone.
Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper mutilated by disease and amputation. Querry slowly moves towards a cure, his mind getting clearer as he works for the colony. However, in the heat of the tropics, no relationship with a married woman, will ever be taken as innocent...
In a previous career, I traveled extensively to many parts of the world. I always found new cultures, old traditions, strange languages, and exotic environments fascinating. Perhaps even more fascinating, were the expats I found who had traded in their home country for an existence far from where they were born and different from how they were reared. In many instances, I’ve attempted to incorporate—in Heinlein’s words—this stranger in a strange land motif in my work. It always seems to heighten my interest. I hope the reader’s as well.
The setting is Shanghai, China in 1926. A mysterious city full of expatriates. One of the most beautiful is Natasha Medvedev, a former aristocrat in Russia who fled the revolution and now finds herself in the circle of a notorious drug lord. Her neighbor is murdered and suddenly she’s dealing with expats in the local police force like Caprisi, a tough Chicago cop, and a young Englishman named Fields who will fall in love with her, putting both in peril. This is a mystery, a love story, and perhaps most of all, a fresco of words illuminating a place and time that will be forever engraved in the reader’s memory.
Shanghai, 1926: a sultry city lousy with opium, warlords, and corruption at the highest levels. Into this steamy morass walks Richard Field, an idealistic Brit haunted by his past and recently appointed to the international police. He’s not there long before called to the flat of a Russian prostitute, former daughter of privilege found sadistically murdered, handcuffed to her bed. When he discovers among her possessions a cryptic shipping log, he senses that this murder is more than a random crime of perverse passion. What unfolds is a searing story that propels Field into a confrontation with the city’s most…
In a previous career, I traveled extensively to many parts of the world. I always found new cultures, old traditions, strange languages, and exotic environments fascinating. Perhaps even more fascinating, were the expats I found who had traded in their home country for an existence far from where they were born and different from how they were reared. In many instances, I’ve attempted to incorporate—in Heinlein’s words—this stranger in a strange land motif in my work. It always seems to heighten my interest. I hope the reader’s as well.
This novel brings readers up close and personal with Hong Kong. Clarke is a young Englishman doing a banking stint in the fabled city. He lives a relatively sedate existence in his corporately antiseptic neighborhood. But one day he decides to get off his beaten path and winds up having his life changed dramatically. He becomes enamored with a shantytown prostitute, embroiled in the geopolitical struggle with Mainland China, and involved in a potential swindle of international proportions. In addition to spinning an interesting tale, Craft is also able to weave in the ticking time bomb of environmental hazards that plague the area without pious preaching and totally within the confines of the story he’s telling.
Rivers had become toxic and the ocean shore is a sea of plastic: there's money to be made. But for Philip Clarke, handsome, clever, and decidedly available, that world seemed a distraction from an altogether different one, where the possibilities of pleasure overwrote the machinery of commerce.
Newly arrived in Hong Kong, his island world lay somewhere between the looming shadow of China, and its strange double downtown, where bankers and brokers breathed the same crowded air as a new breed of political activists. In his mind, he was thankfully immune from both.
While a graduate student and then an army interpreter in Germany, I listened to reminiscences from both Third Reich military veterans and former French resistance fighters. Their tales picked up where my father's stories of pre-war European life always ended, and my fascination with this history knew no bounds. On occasion I would conceal my American identity and mentally play the spy as I traversed Europe solo.A dozen years later upon the death of my father, I learned from my mother his great secret: he had concealed his wartime life as an American spy inside the Reich. His private journals telling of bravery and intrigue inspire each of my novels.
This author offers a well-crafted history of daily life inside the Reich, a fascinating exploration of the German capital as the Nazi movement brought its citizens to their knees. Extensively researched and documented, Moorhouse vividly portrays the daily oppression and challenges faced on all societal fronts. This well-crafted study enmeshes the reader in life under totalitarian rule.
In Berlin at War , acclaimed historian Roger Moorhouse provides a magnificent and detailed portrait of everyday life at the epicentre of the Third Reich. Berlin was the stage upon which the rise and fall of the Third Reich was most visibly played out. It was the backdrop for the most lavish Nazi ceremonies, the site of Albert Speer's grandiose plans for a new world metropolis," and the scene of the final climactic battle to defeat Nazism. Berlin was the place where Hitler's empire ultimately meet its end, but it suffered mightily through the war as well not only was…
Looking at photographs after my father died, when still living in Spain, I reflected on what life had been like for young men of the WWII generation. This sparked the start of my Peter Cotton series. Living abroad for so long, having more than one language and culture, gives people dual perspective, a shifting identity, which is something that fascinates me—and makes Cotton ideal prey for recruiting as an intelligence agent. I also wanted to explore the complex factors in the shifting allegiances after WW2, when your allies were often your worst enemy. All these are themes that recur in the books chosen here.
Lawton and I both write novels about the post-WWII period and have had great conversations on author panels. The protagonist of Then We Take Berlin, Joe Wilderness, is something of a picaresque anti-hero. His mother died in a bomb attack, his abusive father basically abandoned him, so Joe survives as a petty thief, works the black market, and reads everything in his local library. Called up for National Service, his total lack of respect for rules lands him in military prison—and MI6 offers him a way out. So begins his career as a spy. Set in two timeframes, I particularly enjoyed Lawton’s portrayal of Wilderness’s chameleon-like powers of adaptation and his struggle to reconcile his private life, married to his boss’s daughter, and his undercover persona as a spy.
“A stylish spy thriller” of postwar Berlin—the first in a thrilling new series from the acclaimed author of the Inspector Troy Novels (TheNew York Times Book Review).
John Wilfrid Holderness—aka Joe Wilderness—was a young Cockney cardsharp surviving the London Blitz before he started crisscrossing war-torn Europe as an MI6 agent. With the war over, he’s become a “free-agent gumshoe” weathering Cold War fears and hard-luck times. But now he’s being drawn back into the secret ops business when an ex-CIA agent asks him to spearhead one last venture: smuggle a vulnerable woman out of East Berlin.
I've always loved spy stories. The best offer complex characters, exotic locales, suspense, and stakes higher than any detective story. I got to know quite a few CIA types during my foreign service career. Some became good friends. I never asked them about their work, but once or twice passed a tidbit their way. Once, the local KGB got the notion I was with the CIA or was somehow prone to persuasion. They were all over me for weeks, making me extremely uncomfortable. The station chief held my hand throughout. So, while I can’t claim a lot of personal knowledge, I’ve had a touch. Here’s my list of favorite spy stories.
Though Deighton has gone on to write several hugely popular and better-known spy stories, none of them beats Funeral In Berlin for sheer fun. Narrated by its nameless, smart-ass protagonist, who works for an obscure and underfunded British intelligence agency, the book has all the Cold War suspense, plot twists, and dubious characters you could wish for. Swiftly paced and told with great irreverent humor, it’s terrific entertainment.
A ferociously cool Cold War thriller from the author of The Ipcress File.
Len Deighton's third novel has become a classic, as compelling and suspenseful now as when it first exploded on to the bestseller lists.
In Berlin, where neither side of the wall is safe, Colonel Stok of Red Army Security is prepared to sell an important Russian scientist to the West - for a price. British intelligence are willing to pay, providing their own top secret agent is in Berlin to act as go-between. But it soon becomes apparent that behind the facade of an elaborate mock funeral…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
While John Le Carre wrote many fine books, with some unforgettable classics at his peak, this novel was a revelation.
In this short book, he captures the character of the wonderfully crusty, dissatisfied Leamas, the interdependence of love and betrayal, the frustration and interminable waiting of spying, and the moral bankruptcy essential to pursuing higher objectives.
But for me, the perfect ending, devastating and true to both the character and the Cold War Berlin setting, makes this book memorable.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Our Kind of Traitor; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston.
The 50th-anniversary edition of the bestselling novel that launched John le Carre's career worldwide
In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse-a desk job-Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered…
As a child, I devoured historical works. In fact, the city librarian told my mother when I reached my teens. that I had read every book in the Children’s section on the Civil War and they recommended I get adult privileges. In my teenage years, I developed a taste for spy novels thanks to Ian Fleming. However, as I matured, I became drawn to the less gadgety stories in the genre like the books I recommend here and write myself. I have no unique expertise in the area beside a desire to learn more about the field so my own work will inform as well as entertain.
As I mentioned before, I am a history buff. This book traces the cold war and the CIA through the lives of three wonderful characters. A loyal agent, a Russian spy, and a mole in American intelligence are all done in a way that puts you in their shoes from the Cold War’s start through the demise of the Soviet Union. Littell keeps you on the edge of your seat while teaching you what actually happened. A must-read for spy aficionados.
The New York Times bestselling spy novel The Company lays bare the history and inner workings of the CIA. This critically acclaimed blockbuster from internationally renowned novelist Robert Littell seamlessly weaves together history and fiction to create a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga of the CIA-known as "the Company" to insiders. Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the '50s, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an amoral, elusive, formidable enemy-and each other-in an internecine battle within…
When I realized I didn’t have what it takes to join the CIA, I made it my life mission to find out everything it takes to be a spy—which, of course, made it necessary to watch every show and read every espionage story ever told. In the process, I discovered a passion for uncovering truth, as well as a love of writing. After writing three young adult spy novels, I feel like I’ve found the linguist, code breaker, and crime fighter in myself. My work for LitJoy Crate has given me the ability to know a good story when I read it, and then recommend that book to book lovers everywhere.
I fell in love with the main character, Loveday (no pun intended), in the first few pages. She’s strong and tough, like all spies should be, and sarcastic—which is so fun to read.
I love her motivation as a spy, but she does have one flaw: she's in love with another member of the team and has been keeping him off missions to keep him safe. This makes me like her even more because she wants to protect him. Overall, the action, explosions, love story between Loveday and Vale, and the spy world had me reading until the very end.
I can’t wait to jump into the next book in the series.
Known only to the CIA and her handler father, Loveday aspires to be the greatest teenage spy who ever lived. In a hidden bunker under a swanky hotel, she and her team train and execute missions without being noticed by the outside world.
When Loveday and her team are recruited for their first international mission, it's their big chance to prove their worth to the CIA. But when her comms specialist boyfriend, Vale lobbies for a shot at field work, Loveday is caught between duty and forbidden passion. She knows putting…
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