In the 1960s, an American who had spied for the Russians is traded in a prisoner swap to East Berlin, where he learns his wife and son have found new lives, in Joseph Kanon's The Berlin Exchange.
The man immediately sets about trying to get his family back, even though his wife is now married to a high-level government official and--perhaps more alarmingly--his son is starring in a television sitcom promoting government views.
Kanon writes a vivid, tense thriller of this Cold War period, where everyone is at least double-crossing or triple-crossing everyone else, with a particularly melancholy but fitting coda.
Kanon is a popular writer of spy fiction, but this is the first of his I have dipped into; I will definitely seek out more.
I listened to this in a good audiobook reading on loan from the Henry County-New Castle Public Library in New Castle, Indiana.
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