The Fire Agent : A Novel

“A novel of inspiring humanity and heartbreaking fallibility, The Fire Agent shines a spotlight on the echoes still reverberating to this day. It’s a spy novel, a war story, a love story. It is a brilliant piece of historical fiction that is hardly fictional at all.”—Graham Yost, executive producer of The Americans and Slow Horses

“Historical fiction on an epic scale. A page-turner about spies in prewar Tokyo but with the weight of moral inquiry at its heart and a fascinating look at a Japan we only thought we knew. A remarkable achievement.”—Joseph Kanon, author of Shanghai and The Good German

A sweeping, unforgettable debut novel of espionage, war, love, and tragedy that redefines our understanding of the first half of the twentieth century.

Ernst Baerwald, the scion of an aristocratic German-Jewish family, is a gifted linguist, a talented musician, and a fearless idealist at the dawn of the twentieth century. His work in Milan and then Japan for what will become the German chemical company IG Farben, which is developing a chemical compound that will save humanity from the brink of famine, provides pretext to his undercover work as a spy, while his complicated love life fulfills his romantic sensibilities. Yet as one world war breaks out and then another, irrevocably changing all he once believed in, Ernst discovers that his skills in diplomacy and stealth are now useful in ways he never anticipated. As he struggles to stay true to his convictions, he comes to understand that sometimes it is necessary to destroy what you love most for the greater good.

Based on the life of David Baerwald’s grandfather, The Fire Agent is an astonishing work of fiction that takes us from the idealism of nineteenth-century German science to the dawning of chemical warfare; from Japan’s Yakuza to FDR’s boutique spy shops; from the rise of fascism in Japan and Germany to America’s global dominance at the dawn of the Cold War. A haunting novel about the weight of inheritance and the invisible strings of history that shape us, it has deep resonance for our own times.