From internationally bestselling author Joseph Kanon, hailed by the Sunday Times as ‘the most accomplished spy novelist working today’, comes a thriller set in WW2 Shanghai, a seductive and corrupt setting defined by wealth, crime and a dazzling nightlife.
Joseph Kanon Book order







- 2024
- 2022
From master of suspense Joseph Kanon, author of the bestsellers Istanbul Passage and Leaving Berlin, an espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War, when a captured American who has spied for the KGB is swapped by the British for some German students and returns to East Berlin needing to know who arranged his release and what they want from him.
- 2019
The Accomplice
- 336 pages
- 12 hours of reading
A heart-pounding and intelligent espionage novel about a Nazi war criminal who was supposed to be dead, the rogue CIA agent on his trail, and the beautiful woman connected to them both
- 2017
Defectors
- 290 pages
- 11 hours of reading
"In 1949, Frank Weeks, fair-haired boy of the newly formed CIA, was exposed as a Communist spy and fled the country to vanish behind the Iron Curtain. Now, twelve years later, he has written his memoirs, a KGB- approved project almost certain to be an international bestseller, and has asked his brother Simon, a publisher, to come to Moscow to edit the manuscript. It's a reunion Simon both dreads and longs for. The book is sure to be filled with mischief and misinformation; Frank's motives suspect, the CIA hostile. But the chance to see Frank, his adored older brother, proves irresistible. And at first Frank is still Frank--the same charm, the same jokes, the same bond of affection that transcends ideology. Then Simon begins to glimpse another Frank, still capable of treachery, still actively working for "the service." He finds himself dragged into the middle of Frank's new scheme, caught between the KGB and the CIA in a fatal cat and mouse game that only one of the brothers is likely to survive."--
- 2015
From the author of The Good German(made in a film starring George Clooney) comes a sweeping novel set in post-war Berlin. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. Filled with intrigue and the moral ambiguity of conflicted loyalties, Leaving Berlinis a masterfu thriller and a love story that brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.
- 2014
- 2012
Istanbul Passage
- 416 pages
- 15 hours of reading
A neutral capital straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has spent the war as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even American businessman Leon Bauer has been drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs for the Allied war effort. Now as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of post-war life, he is given one more assignment, a routine job that goes fatally wrong, plunging him into a tangle of intrigue and moral confusion. Played out against the bazaars and mosques and faded mansions of this knowing, ancient Ottoman city, Leon's attempt to save one life leads to a desperate manhunt and a maze of shifting loyalties that threatens his own. How do you do the right thing when there are only bad choices to make? Istanbul Passage is the story of a man swept up in the aftermath of war, an unexpected love affair, and a city as deceptive as the calm surface waters of the Bosphorus that divides it.
- 2011
Stardust
- 512 pages
- 18 hours of reading
Amesmerising tale of old Hollywood glamour and post-war espionage from the author of The Good German.
- 2002
From the author of Leaving Berlin comes this gripping a Cold War thriller, which was turned into a major film and is now considered a modern classic
- 2000
From the author of Leaving Berlin, a riveting tale of love, revenge and murder set in post-war Venice