by Ian McEwan, 2010, Kindle Edition, Anchor

I chose this book because I ran out of books on my Kindle and, when I searched for books that were available at the library, I found this one and it looked interesting.

The book is set in Berlin beginning a few years after the end of WWII. It’s about an English telephone expert working for a British a spy agency who is recruited to help build a joint American-British project that is designed to listen to Russian conversations between a site in the Russian Zone in Berlin and Moscow. While he is helping build the system, he becomes romantically involved with a German woman who is his first love.

The story is interesting as it is based on a real project that was undertaken by the Americans. The book, however, seems to bog down when it describes the aftermath of a crime that the Englishman and his fiancé commit. The author describes in detail the actions and thoughts of the main character, some of which are hallucinations. While all of this makes the story more compelling, it also made reading it a bit of a chore.