The Prodigal Spy, Joseph Kanon
The Prodigal Spy, Joseph Kanon
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The Prodigal Spy

Author: Joseph Kanon

Narrator: Boyd Gaines

Abridged: 6 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/05/2000


Synopsis

What if the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s had actually uncovered a spy? The bestselling author of Los Alamos returns with a thrilling new novel of suspense, romance, and intrigue.  

Washington, 1950.  The trouble with history, Nick Kotlar's father tells him, is that you have to live through it before you know how it'll come out.  And for Walter Kotlar, a high-level State Department official, the stakes couldn't be higher: an ambitious congressman has accused him of treason.  As Nick watches helplessly, his family's privileged world is turned upside down in a frenzy of klieg lights and banging gavels.

Then one snowy night the chief witness against his father plunges to her death and his father flees, leaving only an endless mystery and the stain of his defection.  It would be better, Nick is told, to think of him as dead.

But twenty years later Walter Kotlar is still alive, and he enlists Molly, a young journalist, to bring Nick a disturbing message.  He badly wants to see his son; after two decades of silence and isolation, he is desperate to end his own Cold War.  Resentful but intrigued, Nick agrees to accompany Molly to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia for the painful reunion.  

Once in Prague, Nick finds a clandestine world where nothing is what it seems--not the beautiful city, shadowy with menace; not the woman with whom he falls in love; and most of all not the man he thinks he no longer knows, yet still knows better than anyone.  For Walter Kotlar has an impossible request: he wants to come home and he wants Nick to help.  He also has a valuable secret about what really happened the night he walked out of Nick's life--and about the deadly conspiracy that still threatens them.

The Prodigal Spy is a story of fathers and sons and the loyalties that transcend borders, and of a young man's search for the truth buried in his own past, when a national drama was made personal and history itself became a crime story.  Like Los Alamos, this is at once an ingenious mystery, a love story, and a masterly recreation of an era whose legacy haunts our own.

About The Author

Joseph Kanon is the internationally bestselling author of eight novels, which have been published in twenty-four languages, including: Los Alamos, which won the Edgar Award for best first novel, The Good German, which was made into a film starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, The Prodigal Spy, Alibi, which earned Kanon the Hammett Award of the International Association of Crime Writers, Istanbul Passage, and Leaving Berlin. He is also a recipient of the Anne Frank Human Writers Award for his writings on the aftermath of the Holocaust. He lives in New York City with his wife, literary agent Robin Straus. They have two sons.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tom

Walter Kotlar is the son of working class immigrants who attends Yale and becomes part of the establishment. He's caught up in the 50's fear of the Red Menace and forced to testify before the Committee on Un American Activities. -He seems a very unlikely Communist but before the hearing is concluded......more

Goodreads review by Mal

Joseph Kanon has been writing spy novels set largely in post-World War II Europe since 1997, when his debut novel, Los Alamos, was published. That book won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel — well-deserved recognition for an outstanding thriller that was also an accomplished work of historical fi......more

Goodreads review by Len

this is the first 'spy novel I've read for about thirty years. I loved it. it was thoughtful, well paced, detailed, and cerebral. it occasionally required a bit of a leap, and the villain of the piece was signalled way at the start, but apart from those few minor niggles, it was a first class effort......more

Goodreads review by Ed

The problem with this novel is that it is schizophrenic; there is a leisurely character development and exploration of an historical era, and there is an exciting spy caper with a climax including J. Edgar Hoover as a character. At 536 pages, the novel is almost long enough for both. The first half......more


Quotes

Acclaim for Los Alamos:

"Compelling. . . . [Kanon] pulls the reader into a historical  drama of excitement and high moral seriousness."
--The New York Times

"A terrific mystery."
--Newsweek

"A well-plotted novel that effortlessly dissolves real people and events into an elegant and moving thriller."
--The San Francisco Chronicle

"Genuinely thrilling.  .  .  .  A serious novel with profound implications."
--The Washington Post Book World

"The suspense novel for all others to beat. . . . [A] must-read."
--The Denver Post

"Read this book. . . . It's a love story inside a murder mystery inside perhaps the most significant story of the 20th century: the making of the atomic bomb. . . . A stunning achievement."
--The Boston Globe