Defectors

Waterstones Thriller of the Month for February 2018

The author of Leaving Berlin and The Good German turns his considerable abilities to the era of 1960s defection and the Cold War at its most heated.

“The question isn’t what’s right, his father would say, the question is what’s the right thing to do? They’re not always the same.”

It is 1961. Over a decade earlier, and exposed as a Communist Spy, former CIA golden boy Frank Weeks skipped the Iron Curtain, leaving a trail of deception and ruin. Caught in the slipstream is his brother Simon, now a publisher in New York after being forced to resign from his position in the State Department.

Frank, however, has re-emerged, summoning his brother to Moscow to help edit the memoir he has been working on since his arrival. Despite all the treachery and damage, for Simon, Frank still has his allure: the dangerous, ideological charmer, the spy still holding tight the reasons behind his shocking betrayal. As Simon accepts the challenge, the long game Frank has been playing all his life edges toward its deadly, duplicitous conclusion. All, however, is rarely what it seems, not least for Simon, who shields secrets of his own...

Joseph Kanon – a former New York publisher himself – brings all of his insider knowledge and urbane observation to deliver an exceptional, le Carré-class thriller. In Frank Weeks we discover shades of Graham Greene’s Harry Lime, a man who has made the half-world of defection in a foreign state his own. In Moscow, we discover a brittle playground of those who have risked everything for communism but now find themselves disillusioned and under the constant observation of the state.

American author Joseph Kanon is internationally recognised as one of the finest contemporary writers of espionage fiction, earning him comparison with Graham Greene and John le Carré. His novels include: Los Alamos, The Prodigal Spy, The Good German, Alibi, Stardust, Istanbul Passage, Leaving Berlin and Defectors.

Read an exclusive article for Waterstones in which Joseph Kanon discusses location scouting in the past and how he got under the skin of Cold War Moscow.