Reading group: choose a book to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall in November

Its a quarter of a century since the Berlin Wall came down so how best to explore that divided world in fiction?

Twenty-five years ago, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the world changed. You dont need me to tell you how much difference that quarter-century has made but nor is it necessarily easy to understand the changes it has wrought. As that momentous event recedes into the past, its getting harder for us to understand the previous world order. One good way to make that imaginative leap is to read a novel making the wall an excellent subject for the Reading group.

Weve been to Berlin already but there are still hundreds of novels about the city to choose from. The cold war is almost a literary genre in itself. It would be tremendous to look at anything by writers such as Ian Fleming, John le Carré and why not Tom Clancy. (Or almost anything. Weve already covered Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.) Meanwhile, the fall of the Wall was, of course, an event with global implications. It might be just as interesting to look at novels from the wider world imbued with cold-war paranoia and horror. Not least because that enables us to extend the remit to classics such as Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49, Kurt Vonneguts Cats Cradle, Graham Greenes Our Man in Havana and even Don DeLillos mighty Underworld. And then there are the voices from across the divide, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky ...

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