Books by Robert Littell
The Defection of A.J. Lewinter
In a republication of the author's 1973 first novel, unremarkable American scientist A. J. Lewinter triggers a series of high-stakes events when, during an academic conference in Tokyo, he contacts the KGB with an offer to defect, a proposal neither country can be sure is genuine. By the author of The Company. Reprint.
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The Defection of A.J. Lewinter
A new edition of the spy classic by Robert Littell, New York Times bestselling master of the espionage thriller.
The black comedy follows a pawn in the American military complex whose decision to change sides might determine the outcome of the Cold War.
An engineer who’s spent most of his career studying ceramic nose cones for ballistic missiles, American scientist A.J. Lewinter is used to being a cog in the military-industrial complex—until, while at a conference in Tokyo, he rushes into the Russian Embassy offering to defect.
Hard-edged US intelligence operative Leo Diamond sets out to determine what, if anything, Lewinter knows; on the Soviet side, KGB agent Yefgeny Pogodin must decipher whether this high-level defection is another ruse in a long-standing war. Neither global superpower knows what to expect from Lewinter, the wild card, but both sides know this: If he’s telling the truth, his information could be the final turning point in the Cold War.
A darkly funny spy thriller from one of the most brilliant voices of espionage fiction, The Defection of A.J. Lewinter is a shockingly prescient portrayal of international politics.
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Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation
Robert Littell is the undisputed master of American spy fiction, hailed for his profound grasp of the world of international espionage. His previous novel, The Company, an international bestseller, was praised as "one of the best spy novels ever written" (Chicago Tribune). For his new novel, Legends, Littell focuses on the life of one great agent caught in a "wilderness of mirrors" where both remembering and forgetting his past are deadly options. Martin Odum is a CIA field agent turned private detective, struggling his way through a labyrinth of past identities - "legends" in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Or is he Dante Pippen, an IRA explosives maven? Or Lincoln Dittmann, Civil War expert? These men like different foods, speak different languages, have different skills. Is he suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Can Odum trust the CIA psychiatrist? Or Stella Kastner, a young Russian woman who engages him to find her brother-in-law so he can give her sister a divorce. As Odum redeploys his dormant tradecraft skills to solve Stella's case, he travels the globe battling mortal danger and psychological disorientation. Part Three Faces of Eve, part The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and always pure Robert Littell, Legends―from unforgettable opening to astonishing ending―again proves Littell's unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller.
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Legends
Now a TNT series starring Sean Bean, from the producers of 24 and Homeland
Robert Littell is today widely considered one of the true grand masters of American spy fiction, hailed for his profound grasp of the ambiguous world of international espionage, grippingly displayed in his thirteen novels. His most recent international bestseller, The Company, was praised as being "popular fiction at its finest" by the Washington Post Book World and as "one of the best spy novels ever written" by the Chicago Tribune. Now delving into one agent's labyrinth of memories and past identities—"legends," in CIA parlance—Legends again displays Littell's unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller exploring the clandestine but always very human world of secret agents.
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The Once and Future Spy
Robert Littell is a master storyteller of the highest caliber in the ranks of John le Carré, Len Deighton, and Graham Greene. The Once and Future Spy is a tale of espionage and counterespionage that reveals the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets of the subjects Littell knows best—the CIA and American history. When “the Weeder,” an operative at work on a highly sensitive project for “the Company,” encounters an elite group of specialists within the innermost core of the CIA protecting a clandestine plan, the present confronts the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. Inventive, imaginative, and relentlessly gripping, The Once and Future Spy is Robert Littell at his most original.
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The Once and Future Spy
By national best-selling author, Robert Littell, whose most recent novel The Company received rave reviews across the nation, The Once and Future Spy is finally back in print. This is Littell at the top of his form, constructing a tale of espionage and counterespionage revealing the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets about the subjects he knows intimately the CIA and American history, past and present. Littell proves beyond all doubt that he is a storyteller of inimitable caliber. As Stephen Coonts put it, “Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel. Robert Littell perfected it. The Once and Future Spy is a classic spy story.” At the center of Littell’s plot is an elite plan, so secret and so dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within CIA headquarters. There is virtually no paper trail but, somehow, the plan has sprung a leak. The plotters must urgently trace it or face deadly consequences. Meanwhile, at work elsewhere on another highly sensitive project for "the Company" is an operative known as “the Weeder” a man obsessed with American history and one of its heroes. When the Weeder's and Washington's clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?
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The Once and Future Spy
In this espionage classic by the New York Times bestselling author of The Company, two CIA operatives—one with something to hide, the other with something to prove—face off when a top-secret scheme is exposed.
The most elite levels of the CIA’s Counterintelligence unit are on the verge of pulling off an operation so huge it will change global politics—and so secret that it has no paper trail. But the operation’s organizer, Roger Wanamaker, has evidence that the plan has sprung a leak. Now it is a deadly race against time to “walk back the cat”—isolate the leak and plug it—before the scheme is exposed and an international conflict is ignited.
Meanwhile analyst Silas Sibley—nicknamed “The Weeder” due to his talent for parsing intelligence with experimental computer technology—has uncovered information no one was ever meant to find. Now he has to decide what to do with it: expose the unfolding atrocity, even if it means cutting the knees out from the intelligence agency he works for and has, up until now, believed in? Or is there some other solution? Clinging fiercely to the legacy of his ancestor American Revolutionary war hero Nathan Hale, the Weeder takes matters into his own hands.
Surprising and complex, this psychological deep dive into obsession, loyalty, and history, poses the question: Whose truth should be believed?
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Vicious Circle
by Robert Littell, Wilbur Smith
The New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell presents a suspenseful and brilliantly topical new thriller that looks at the cycle of political violence in the Middle East. In the near future, an unprecedented Arab-Israeli settlement is brokered by a visionary female president of the United States. But this historic moment is shattered when a well-known fundamentalist rabbi is taken hostage by a legendary Palestinian terrorist. As the Israelis close in, the hostage and the hostage taker develop bizarre bonds and form a terrifying alliance. In the tradition of John le Carré and Graham Greene, Littell dissects the culture of violence by searchingthe corrupted consciences of the people ensnared within it.
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Vicious Circle
by Robert Littell, Wilbur Smith
Internationally bestselling author Wilbur Smith returns with Vicious Circle--a heart-racing story of family secrets, greed, and revenge.
Hector Cross left behind a career of high risks and warfare when he married his beloved Hazel Bannock. But after his new life is tragically upended, he recognizes the ruthless hand of an old enemy behind the attack.
Determined to fight back, Hector draws together a team of his most loyal friends and fellow warriors to hunt down those who pursue him and his loved ones. For he and Hazel have a child, a precious daughter, whom he will go to the ends of the earth to protect.
Soon, however, Hector learns that the threat comes not just from his old enemies, but also Hazel's. Brutal figures from her family's past―thought long gone―are returning, with an agenda so sinister that Hector realizes he is facing a new type of adversary. One whose deadly methods and dark secrets will lead Hector to a series of crimes so shocking that he has no choice but to settle the score.
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Walking Back the Cat
Now back in print?a mesmerizing espionage thriller from the bestselling author of The Company
Robert Littell has made a name for himself as one of the foremost authors of literary spy thrillers. Here, Littell abandons his usual East European milieu to focus on New Mexico, where a Sovietera KGB agent, code-named Parsifal, has been living under deep cover. Reactivated by a new controller for some particularly brutal ?wetwork??murder?Parsifal?s suspicions are aroused. Fearing a double- cross, he begins, in espionage lingo, ?walking back the cat??retracing the operation to find the source of the deception. His manhunt leads him to an Apache-run casino where he crosses paths with CIA operatives, Apaches, and Finn, a disillusioned Gulf War vet with his own investigation to pursue.
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The October Circle
An explosive story of friendship and sacrifice in the depths of the Cold War era
Connoisseurs of the literary spy thriller rank Robert Littell, the bestselling author of The Company, with John le Carré, Graham Greene, and Alan Furst in the first tier of the genre's pantheon. Set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Prague, The October Circle is one of Littell's most riveting early works. Seven of Bulgaria's cultural elite-all disillusioned communists-and one American drifter find themselves staging an extremely dangerous protest that will set off a wave of repression and threatens to repay their heroism with death.
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The Debriefing
Now back in print?a taut spy thriller from The New York Times bestselling author of The Company
With the publication of his New York Times bestseller The Company, Robert Littell re-established his position among the highest ranks of writers of literary espionage novels. In The Debriefing, long out of print until now, Littell offers another novel of exquisite suspense.
Stone is the head of an elite arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?and a master of the psychologically sophisticated art of debriefing. When Oleg Kulakov defects from Russia, handcuffed to a sealed diplomatic pouch, it?s Stone?s job to find out if he?s genuine. As Stone uncovers Kulakov?s darkest secrets, he penetrates Russia itself to learn the chilling truth . . . a truth that tears his own world apart.
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The Debriefing
With the publication of his New York Times bestseller The Company, Robert Littell reestablished his position as one of the top writers of intelligent, ironic, and always entertaining espionage thrillers. After many years The Debriefing is finally available again as Overlook brings back Littell’s classics. From the secret meeting rooms of Washington to the interrogation chambers of the KGB, The Debriefing is a novel of exquisite suspense and dazzlingly tense drama. Stone is the Head of an elite arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff―and a master of the sophisticated art of debriefing. When Oleg Kulakov defects from Russia, handcuffed to a sealed diplomatic pouch, it's Stone's job to find out if he's genuine. He uncovers Kulakov’s every secret, probes the darkest reaches of Kulakov’s heart, and penetrates Russia itself to learn the chilling truth―a truth that tears his own world apart.
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The Sisters
An astonishing thriller from the author of The Company
A classic among espionage aficionados, The Sisters features what the New York Times called "the plot of plots." Centering on Francis and Carroll, two enigmatic and extremely dangerous CIA legends dubbed "the Sisters Death and Night," The Sisters masterfully unveils an abyss of artful deception. By luring the Potter, a former head of the KGB sleeper school, into betraying his last and best assassin living secretly in the United States, Francis and Carroll set off a desperate race against time as the Potter tries to stop his protégé from committing the Sisters' exquisitely planned, world-shattering crime.
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The Sisters
In what Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times called "the plot of plots," Robert Littell has created the CIA "legends" Francis and Carroll, dubbed "The Sisters Death and Night" by their cohorts. But few know what these enigmatic and extremely dangerous operatives do. They plot-and they're plotting the perfect crime. They've located the perfect pawn-the Potter, the exiled ex-head of the KGB sleeper school-and, with artful deception, the Sisters coerce him into betraying his last and best sleeper, the man he considers his son. Once awakened, this sleeper, an assassin living secretly in the U.S., will launch a mission of death-unless the Potter, in a desperate race against time, can stop his protege from committing the Sisters' perfect and world-shattering crime.
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Young Philby: A Novel
A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2012
A Kansas City Star Top Book the Year
When Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most notorious double agent in the history of espionage. Recruited into His Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service at the beginning of World War II, he rose rapidly in the ranks to become the chief liaison officer with the CIA in Washington after the war. The exposure of other members of the group of British double agents known as the Cambridge Five led to the revelation that Philby had begun spying for the Soviet Union years before he joined the British intelligence service. He eventually fled to Moscow one jump ahead of British agents who had come to arrest him, and spent the last twenty-five years of his life in Russia.
In Young Philby, Robert Littell recounts the little-known story of the spy's early years. Through the words of Philby's friends and lovers, as well as his Soviet and English handlers, we follow the evolution of a mysteriously beguiling man who kept his masters on both sides of the Iron Curtain guessing about his ultimate loyalties. As each layer of ambiguity is exposed, questions surface: What made this infamous double (or should that be triple?) agent tick? And, in the end, who was the real Kim Philby?
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A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel
Former CIA agent Lemuel Gunn left the battlefield of Afghanistan for early retirement in the desert of New Mexico, where he works as a private investigator from the creature comforts, such as they are, of a mobile home.
Into his life comes Ornella Neppi, a thirty-something woman making a hash out of her uncle's bail bonds business. The source of her troubles, Emilio Gava, was arrested for buying cocaine. Ornella has reason to believe he is planning to jump bail. Unless she can find him, her uncle is going to be $125,000 out of pocket.
For $95-a-day plus expenses (not to mention the pleasure of her company), Gunn agrees to help Ornella track the wayward suspect down. Curiously, no photographs of Gava seem to exist. Once Gunn begins his manhunt, he starts to wonder whether Gava himself existed in the first place.
Robert Littell has been widely praised as one of the best espionage writers of our time. Now, he's turned his formidable skills toward crime fiction in A Nasty Piece of Work, a novel that Le Monde has already praised as "one of those page-turning detective tales that feels like an instant classic.… A Chandleresque noir novel, as delightful as it is suspenseful."
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The Stalin Epigram: A Novel
A tale inspired by the life of forefront twentieth-century Russian poet Osip Mandelstam recounts his outspoken criticism of the Stalin regime, the verbal distribution of his famous "Stalin Epigram" that led to his arrest, and his subsequent exile and death in a Siberian transit camp.
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Vicious Circle: A Novel of Complicity
Out of this familiarly cyclical scenario emerges what is perhaps Robert Littell s most heartfelt and suspenseful novel. The action moves forward into the near future, when the global community, united under the leadership of a visionary woman president of the United States, brokers a major compromise between Israel and the Palestinian authority in the hopes of snuffing out the violent flash-point that fuels the flames of global terrorism. But then, Isaac Apflbaum, a well-known fundamentalist Rabbi, is taken hostage by Dr. al-Saath, a legendary Palestinian terrorist, who demands the release of several Palestinian prisoners in exchange for his prisoner. As Israel coaxes Elihu out of retirement to hunt down the terrorist who motivated his final mission, al-Saath and Apflbaum find themselves building an extraordinary relationship between hostage taker and hostage: parallels between these two battle-hardened partisans become the bonds that could lead to reconciliation. But with the Mossad strike team closing in, has the vicious circle already been closed. Ferociously suspenseful and brilliantly topical, Vicious Circle is a thriller that, like The Company before it, breaks down an entire culture of violence into the corrupted consciences that embody it.
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The Amateur
by Robert Littell, Edward Klein
Think you know the real Barack Obama? You don’tnot until you’ve read The Amateur
In this stunning exposé, bestselling author Edward Kleina contributing editor to Vanity Fair, former foreign editor of Newsweek, and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazinepulls back the curtain on one of the most secretive White Houses in history. He reveals a callow, thin-skinned, arrogant president with messianic dreams of grandeur supported by a cast of true-believers, all of them united by leftist politics and an amateurish understanding of executive leadership.
In The Amateur you’ll discover:
Why the so-called centrist” Obama is actually in revolt against the values of the society he was elected to lead
Why Bill Clinton loathes Barack Obama and tried to get Hillary to run against him in 2012
The spiteful rivalry between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey
How Obama split the Kennedy family
How Obama has taken more of a personal role in making foreign policy than any president since Richard Nixonwith disastrous results
How Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett are the real powers behind the White House throne
The Amateur is a reporter’s book, buttressed by nearly 200 interviews, many of them with the insiders who know Obama best. The result is the most important political book of the year. You will never look at Barack Obama the same way again.
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The Amateur
by Robert Littell, Edward Klein
A spy thriller classic, soon to be a major motion picture starring Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitriona Balfe, and Laurence Fishburne
Before Robert Littell vaulted onto the bestseller lists with his New York Times bestselling CIA novel The Company, The Amateur established him as a contemporary master of the espionage thriller.
Charlie Heller is an ace cryptographer for the CIA, a quiet man in a quiet back-office job. But when his fiancée is murdered by terrorists and the Agency decides not to pursue her killers, Heller takes matters into his own hands. The fact that he is an amateur makes him all the more dangerous. Mind-blowing in its intelligence, pulse-pounding in its suspense, The Amateur is a sleek and stunning novel of revenge.
Now a major motion picture from 20th Century Studios starring Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitriona Balfe, and Laurence Fishburne.
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$19.95
Bronshtein in the Bronx
A wry, thought-provoking fictional portrayal of ten pivotal weeks in the life of Leon Trotsky, inspired by the Russian revolutionary's exile in New York City in 1917, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Company
January 12, 1917: An ocean liner docks in New York Harbor. Among the disembarking emigrants is one Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—better known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky. Bronshtein has been on the run for a decade, driven from his beloved Russia after escaping political exile in Siberia. He lives for—and is ready to sacrifice his life for—a workers’ revolution, at any cost. But is he ready to become an American?
In the weeks leading up to the February Revolution that will eventually see Lenin’s Bolsheviks seize power, Bronshtein haunts the streets, newspaper offices, and socialist watering holes of New York City, wrestling with the difficult questions of his personal revolutionary ideology, his place in his own family, his relationship to Lenin, and, above all, his conscience.
Master of the espionage novel, Robert Littell brings to life the world-famous revolutionist’s sojourn in the Bronx in this extraordinary meditation on purpose, passion, and the price of progress.
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The Company: A Novel of the CIA
This critically acclaimed blockbuster from internationally renowned novelist Robert Littell seamlessly weaves together history and fiction to create a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga of the CIA—known as "the Company" to insiders. Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the '50s, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an amoral, elusive, formidable enemy—and each other—in an internecine battle within the Company itself. A brilliant, stunningly conceived epic thriller, The Company confirms Littell's place among the genre's elite.
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Mother Russia
A riveting thriller about crime and punishment in Soviet-era Moscow.
Like the Arkady Renko novels of Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Littell's masterful Mother Russia transports readers back in time and behind the Iron Curtain to experience the extremes of Soviet society. Robespierre Pravdin is a black marketeer who prowls Moscow's streets and alleys hustling wristwatches. Wishing only to survive in a city suffocated by paranoia and schizophrenia, Robespierre manages to make a tidy profit and stay under the state's radar-until, one day, he meets the woman called "Mother Russia" and becomes ensnared in the Byzantine and profoundly dangerous game of politics. This is another darkly engrossing pageturner from the bestselling author of The Sisters and The Defection of A. J. Lewinter.
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The Defection of A. J. Lewinter (Duplicity)
A.J. LeWinter is an American scientist, for years an insignificant cog in America's complex defense machinery. While at an academic conference in Tokyo, LeWinter contacts the KGB station chief and says he wants to defect. He tantalizes the Russians with U.S. military secrets he claims to possess, but is his defection genuine? Neither the Russians nor the Americans are sure, and LeWinter is swept up in a terrifying political chess match of deceit and treachery. Deft and dazzlingly plotted, this is the book that introduced Robert Littell--the opening shot of a brilliant career.
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The Mayakovsky Tapes A Novel
In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow’s deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure.
The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a portrait of the artist as a young idealist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to his work as a propagandist for the Revolution and on to the censorship battles that turned him against the state (and, more ominously, the state against him), their recollections reveal Mayakovsky as a passionate, complex, sexually obsessed creature trapped in the epicenter of history, struggling to hold onto his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed.
Written by Robert Littell, whom The Washington Post called “one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today, period,” The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that brings to life the tumultuous Stalinist era and the predicament of the artists ensnared in it.
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