Book Description

From the bestselling author of Leaving Berlin and The Good German comes a thrilling and richly imagined novel focused on three weeks in the lives of a select group of defected American spies in Moscow during the height of the Cold War. Moscow, 1961. Stalin has been dead for eight years. With the launch of Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s international prestige is at an all-time high. Former CIA agent Frank Weeks, the most notorious of the defectors to the Soviet Union, is about to publish his memoirs, and what he reveals will send shockwaves through the West.Weeks’s defection in the early 50s shook Washington to its core—he had been a beloved member of the OSS and then the CIA, one of the bright young men who’d come out of the war ready to take an early lead in the new American century. His betrayal rippled throughout the State Department, prompting frantic searches for moles and forcing the resignation of Simon, Frank’s former college roommate and best friend.Now, a Soviet agency approaches Simon, a publisher in New York City, with a controversial proposition to publish the memoirs of his old friend, Frank Weeks. Simon knows that there’s no way the US government will approve the publication of a book clearly intended as propaganda for the KGB…yet he finds the offer irresistible.Set against the paranoiac atmosphere of the Cold War, The Defectors is a smart and authentic exploration of espionage and betrayal, perfect for fans of John le Carre, Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, and other masters of wartime and postwar espionage fiction (Library Journal, starred review).