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Expo 58

Jonathan Coe · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Cold War EraDry HumorEspionageHistorical Fiction
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The Untouchable

John Banville · 410 pages

(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.

Cold War EraEspionageDry HumorHistorical Fiction
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Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene · 240 pages

Wormold's daughter had reached an expensive age - so he accepted a mysterious Englishman's offer of extra income. All he has to do is run agents, file reports, and spy. But his fake reports have an alarming tendency to come true.

Cold War EraDry HumorEspionageLiterary Fiction
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The Unfortunate Englishman

John Lawton · 352 pages

Directed by MI6 to Berlin in 1963 to negotiate a delicate prisoner exchange on either side of the wall, Joe Wilderness covertly plans to use the operation to make a little something extra on the side, with unexpected results.

Cold War EraEspionageDry HumorHistorical Fiction
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Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

EspionageDry HumorCold War EraLiterary Fiction
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The Other Side of Silence

Philip Kerr · 400 pages

Approached by famous writer W. Somerset Maugham to help defend against a blackmailer who knows dangerous secrets, Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer Bernie Gunther follows leads back to Hitler's Third Reich and the development of the bomb in Russia.

Cold War EraEspionageDry HumorHistorical Fiction
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Anarchy and Old Dogs

Colin Cotterill · 272 pages

Cold War EraDry HumorHistorical FictionFunny
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The Innocent

Ian McEwan · 270 pages

It was 1955 and the corpse of post-war Berlin was crawling with spies. A British Post Office technician began his descent into ever deeper echelons of electronic surveillance beneath the surface of Berlin. The author also wrote "The Child in Time".

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Casino Royale

Ian Fleming · 194 pages

Introducing James Bond: charming, sophisticated, handsome, chillingly ruthless and licensed to kill. This, the first of Ian Fleming's tales of secret agent 007, finds Bond on a mission to neutralize a lethal, high-rolling Russian operative called simply "le Chiffre" -- by ruining him at the Baccarat table and forcing his Soviet spymasters to "retire" him. It seems that lady luck is taken with 007

Cold War EraEspionageDry HumorMale Lead
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Funeral in Berlin

Len Deighton · 312 pages

A ferociously cool Cold War thriller from the author of The Ipcress File.Len Deighton's third novel has become a classic, as compelling and suspenseful now as when it first exploded on to the bestseller lists.In Berlin, where neither side of the wall is safe, Colonel Stok of Red Army Security is prepared to sell an important Russian scientist to the West – for a price. British intelligence are wil

Cold War EraDry HumorEspionageMale Lead
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Harlot's Ghost

Norman Mailer · 1,310 pages

"The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature tod

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Libra

Don DeLillo · 456 pages

In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will g

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Honey for the Bears

Anthony Burgess · 255 pages

On a trip to Leningrad, English antique dealer Paul Hussey finds it more difficult than he expected to sell twenty dozen dresses on the black market. Meanwhile his wife Belinda, who is coming to terms with her latent lesbianism, has disappeared into a Soviet hospital.

Cold War EraEspionageLiterary FictionFunny
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Gorky Park

Martin Cruz Smith · 384 pages

A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI and New York police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and well-connected American fu

Cold War EraDry HumorEspionageMale Lead
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Cold War EraEspionageDry HumorMale Lead
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Agent 6

Tom Rob Smith · 552 pages

Wanneer zijn vrouw wordt vermoord in New York, pakt een Russische ex-geheim agent zijn oude stiel op om de dader op te sporen.

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Under the Frog

Tibor Fischer · 250 pages

Set in post-war Hungary between 1944 and 1956, the story follows the lives of two young men and in particular their careers in a travelling basketball team. They spend most of their time in the avoidance of work and army service and in the pursuit of sex.

Cold War EraHistorical FictionLiterary FictionFunny
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Leaving Berlin

Joseph Kanon · 377 pages

Targeted by McCarthyism for his prewar politics, a young Jewish writer who fled the Nazis to America makes a desperate bargain with a fledgling CIA to work as a spy in a decimated Berlin. "From the bestselling author of Istanbul Passage--called a "fast-moving thinking man's thriller" by The Wall Street Journal--comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city caught between poli

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Mr Norris Changes Trains

Christopher Isherwood · 240 pages

"On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris, an irresistibly comical fellow Englishman wearing a rather obvious wig and nervous about producing his passport at the frontier. So begins a friendship conducted in the seedier quarters of the city, where Norris runs a dubious import-export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary, his creditors

Dry HumorEspionageLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir

Bill Bryson · 288 pages

Bill Bryson on his most personal journey yet: into his own childhood in America's Mid-West.Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have l

Cold War EraDry HumorMale LeadFunny
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Masaryk Station

David Downing · 330 pages

Berlin, 1948. Still occupied by the four Allied powers and largely in ruins, the city has become the cockpit of a new Cold War. The legacies of the war have become entangled in the new Soviet-American conflict, creating a world of bizarre and fleeting loyalties--a paradise for spies. Meanwhile, Berlin's German inhabitants live in fear of the Soviet forces who occupy half the city. John Russell wor

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Declare

Tim Powers · 528 pages

As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmarethat has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare. From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from post-war Berlin to the

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Top Secret

W.E.B. Griffin, William E. Butterworth IV · 546 pages

"From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author, a brand-new series about the Cold War-and a different breed of warrior. In the first weeks after World War II, a squeaky-clean new second lieutenant named James D. Cronley Jr. is spotted and recruited for a new enterprise that will eventually be transformed into something called the CIA. One war may have ended, but another one has already begun, agai

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionMale Lead
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An Honorable Man

Paul Vidich · 278 pages

"This gripping first novel in a spy thriller series, set in Washington D.C. at the height of the Red Scare, investigates a double agent in the CIA whose betrayals threaten to compromise the two lead investigators, the Agency, and the entire nation"-- Washington D.C., 1953. As the Cold War heats up, the CIA is reeling from a double agent within their midst. Someone is selling secrets to the Soviet

Cold War EraEspionageHistorical FictionMale Lead

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