Brandenburg Gate

Description

In this brilliant, multilayered, espionage thriller, the 2005 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award winner Henry Porter captures the tense final moments before the fall of the Berlin Wall. September 1989. The Communist government in East Germany is on the brink of collapse. Even the Stasi, one of the most formidable intelligence agencies of all time, can't stop the rebellion that ends in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Dr. Rudi Rosenharte, formerly a Stasi foreign agent, is sent to Trieste to rendezvous with his old lover and agent, Annalise Schering, who the Stasi believe Annalise has vital intelligence. The problem: Rudi knows she's dead. He saw her lying in her own bloodied bathwater, and then kept her suicide a secret. As collateral for this mission, the Stasi have imprisoned Rosenharte's family. But the Stasi is not the only intelligence agency using Rosenharte. Soon the British and Americans encircle him, forcing him to choose between abandoning his beloved brother to a torturous death and returning to East Germany as a double agent. As the political pressures against the East German government rise, Rudi must face his own crises. Brandenburg Gate shows Henry Porter at the top of his game.

"A first-rate thriller ... Porter sustains an elaborate plot skillfully and portrays memorable, multifaceted characters. But his achievement lies in producing a remarkably comprehensive counterpart in fiction to Anna Funder's nonfiction study Stasiland, re-creating the paranoid, Kafkaesque state. This gives Brandenburg Gate a richness of texture ... and exhilaratingly testifies to the thriller genre's ability to transcend its primary role as entertainment."