Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most-celebrated authors of the last 30 years, and his 1990 novel "The Innocent" gruesomely deals with Cold-War divided Berlin and the espionage that occurred there. Leonard Marnham finds himself thrust into a British-American surveillance team who are planning something he is never given the full details of, but that includes tapping phone lines of the Soviet High Command in East Berlin. With Marnham falling in love with Maria Eckdorf, a divorced German woman, things quickly begin to unravel for the Post Office engineer as British and American relations continue to be frosty, while his own personal life turns into a living nightmare. Gruesome and graphically detailed, this novel is not for the squeamish.
NUFC editor for WhatCulture.com/NUFC. History graduate (University of Edinburgh) and NCTJ-trained journalist. I love sports, hopelessly following Newcastle United and Newcastle Falcons. My pastimes include watching and attending sports matches religiously, reading spy books and sampling ales.
