“Joesph Kanon…has woven his plot seamlessly into the historical background. As the hunt for the missing scientist gathers speed, the moral and emotional dimensions of the story become more complex. The mystery takes on the weight of the deepest questions of right and wrong as the novel’s action moves through a ravaged Berlin so exactly depicted that one feels Kanon must have traveled in time to witness this landscape himself…In its articulation of a personal experience of the war and its aftermath, and in the plain power of its prose, The Good German rivals Irwin Shaw’s novel The Young Lions, its history imaginatively accessible, its plot historically inevitable. A novel that brings to life the ambiguities at the heart of our country’s moral legacy. Provocative, fully realized fiction that explores, as only fiction can, the reality of history as it is lived by individual men and women.” –The New York Times
 
“Kanon is the heir apparent to Graham Greene and early-and mid-passage le Carre, for he writes of moral quandaries that are real and not created to drive a plot.”—Robin W. Winks, The Boston Globe