Brandenburg

The Stasi was among the most sophisticated intelligence organisations in the world, but by the end of the 1980s the Orwellian state of East Germany was collapsing around it. The special squads of armed officers, the torture chambers in the Stasi jail, the hundreds of thousands of informers could do nothing to prevent the rebellion that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is in the context of these last few paranoid weeks of the Communist world, when a population that had been oppressed for nearly sixty years found the will to rise up, that this outstanding thriller is set. Its hero is Dr Rudolf Rosenharte, an academic from Dresden and agent for MI6; his controller is Robert Harland, from A Spy's Life and Empire State . When Rosenharte's security is compromised he is faced with a stark choice: to defect to the West, leaving his beloved family to the mercies of the Stasi, or return to East Germany to carry out a dangerous assignment under the Stasi's suspicious eye ...