Books like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

01

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John le Carré · Thriller

George Smiley, a rumpled, semi-retired British intelligence officer, is pulled back from the cold to investigate a claim that a Soviet mole has burrowed into the very top of MI6 — the Circus, as insiders call it.

A kindred thriller read.

02

The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

Ben Macintyre · History

Ben Macintyre tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who became the most important British spy of the Cold War.

A kindred thriller read.

03

Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

Ben Macintyre · History

Eddie Chapman was a safecracker, con man, and professional criminal who became Britain's most remarkable double agent during World War II.

A kindred thriller read.

04

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

Ben Macintyre · History

In 1943, British intelligence planted a dead man on a Spanish beach carrying fabricated documents designed to convince the Germans that the Allied invasion of southern Europe would target Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily.

A kindred thriller read.

05

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote · Memoir

Truman Capote's account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — and of the investigation, capture, trial, and execution of the killers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock — is the founding document of the true crime genre and one of the most admired works of American nonfiction of the twentieth century.

A kindred thriller read.

06

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · History

All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists with his classmates during the First World War after being swept up in patriotic speeches.

Both dig into disillusionment.

07

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · Memoir

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

Both dig into disillusionment.

08

Père Goriot

Honoré de Balzac · Classics

Père Goriot is the novel where Balzac's Human Comedy — his vast project of interlocking stories about French society — finds its moral and architectural center.

Both dig into disillusionment.

09

The Magicians

Lev Grossman · Fantasy

The Magicians follows Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant and deeply unhappy teenager from Brooklyn, who discovers that Brakebills College — a secret school of magic — is real, and that the fantasy world he's been obsessed with since childhood, Fillory (a Narnia analogue), is also real.

Both dig into disillusionment.

10

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's first novel, published in 1926, and it remains the sharpest portrait of the "Lost Generation" — the young Americans and British expatriates who drifted through Paris and Spain in the years after World War I, drinking heavily and searching for something they couldn't name.

Both dig into disillusionment.

11

A Time to Kill

John Grisham · Thriller

In Clanton, Mississippi, two white men rape and nearly kill ten-year-old Tonya Hailey.

A kindred thriller read.

12

Along Came a Spider

James Patterson · Thriller

Along Came a Spider introduces Alex Cross, a Black homicide detective and forensic psychologist working in Washington D.C., in the case that made James Patterson a bestseller.

A kindred thriller read.