Publication

2011 - Atria Books, New York, New York (State)

Language

English

Word Count

133,750 words, Guess

Page Count

535 pages

Identifiers

  • ISBN-139781439180792
  • ISBN-139781439180808
  • ISBN-101439180792
  • ISBN-101439180806
  • Library of Congress Control Number2010048577
and 2 more

Classifications

  • DDC823/.914
  • LCCPR6061.E5956 M66 2011

Description

**Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age.** Living a very private life in Maine — in touch with only his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset — he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The name accompanying the return address on the box — Dussmann — disquiets him completely. For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-five years ago in Berlin — at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were frequently haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War. Refusing initially to confront what he might find in the box, Thomas nevertheless finds himself forced to grapple with a past he has always kept hidden — and in the process relive those months in Berlin, when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the extraordinary force of real love. But Petra Dussmann — the woman to whom he lost his heart — was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow beyond dreams … a sorrow which gradually rewrote both their destinies. In this, his tenth novel, Douglas Kennedy has written a hugely compelling love story at one morally complex, tragic and deeply reflective. Brilliantly gripping, *The Moment* is a profoundly affecting tale of romantic certainty and conflicting loyalties, all set amidst a stunningly portrait of Berlin in the final dark years before the Wall came down.

Description

Travel writer Thomas Nesbitt, age 50, retreats into his house in Maine to wallow in memories of living in Germany 25 years earlier after the success of his first book. In West Berlin as a worker for Radio Liberty, Thomas meets his soul mate, Petra Dussmann, a translator with an iron curtain around her heart. Petra's mysterious melancholy proves irresistible, and as Thomas is drawn into a passionate affair, he also becomes entangled in spy games played by the Stasi and the CIA.

Subjects

Other Editions

  • The moment: a novelAtria Books2011-01-01

Reader Reviews

No reviews yet for this book.

Be the first to share your thoughts!