The Moment
-
-
4.3 • 18 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
A secret from the past can change your life for ever. A heart-breaking love story set in Cold War Berlin by the author of The Pursuit of Happiness and Five Days.
Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer living a very private life in Maine. Until, one wintry morning, his solitude is disrupted by the arrival of a package postmarked Berlin.
But what is more unsettling is the name accompanying the return address on the package: Petra Dussmann. For she is the woman with whom Thomas had an intense love affair twenty-five years before in a divided Berlin, where people lived fearfully under the shadows of the Cold War.
And so Thomas is forced to grapple with a past he has always kept hidden. For Petra Dussman was a refugee from the police state of East Germany. And her tragic secrets were to re-write both their destinies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cold war Berlin provides a moody backdrop for Kennedy's tale of a travel writer's remembrances of love and betrayal, friendship and danger, opportunity and entrapment, while working for Radio Liberty in the divided city. Narrator Thomas Nesbitt, age 50, retreats into his house in Maine to wallow in memories of living in Germany 25 years earlier after the success of his first book. In West Berlin, Thomas meets his soul mate, Petra Dussmann, a translator with an iron curtain around her heart. Petra's mysterious melancholy proves irresistible, and as Thomas is drawn into a passionate affair, he also becomes entangled in spy games played by the Stasi and the CIA. Against the mix of le Carr esque intrigue and Isherwoodish debauchery, the couple's fervor flourishes until they start talking marriage. That's when Thomas learns what nearly everyone has been trying to tell him: relationships are shadowy in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Kennedy (Leaving the World) once again creates characters that are credible if not complex in a compelling if not wildly original love story thickened by stories-within-his-story. This isn't so much a new perspective on the cold war as an observant, compassionate, and romantic portrait of emotional turmoil in troubled times.
Customer Reviews
Amazing
I was completely involved in the story for days, it was heartwrenching. Personalising the hell of the wall and everything it meant, for the reader.