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The Human Factor

Graham Greene · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Smiley's People

John le Carre · 416 pages

DefectorsCold War EraEspionageSlow-Paced
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London Match

Len Deighton · 387 pages

Ce roman fait suite à ##Le réseau Brahms## et à ##Mexico poker## en formant une trilogie. La force de cette sombre histoire d'espionnage réside surtout dans la tentation d'approfondir les états d'âme des principaux protagonistes. Sans reprendre la trilogie de Smiley de John Le Carré, certaines ressemblances dans l'intrigue n'empêcheront pas les amateurs de cette formule de lire avec plaisir ces tr

Cold War EraDefectorsEspionageLondon
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DefectorsCold War EraEspionageLondon
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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 EraDefectorsSlow-PacedEspionage
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Defectors

Joseph Kanon · 290 pages

"From the bestselling author of Leaving Berlin and The Good German comes a fast-paced and richly imagined novel about an American spy, the Cold War's most notorious defector, who gave up his country for the safety--and prison--of Moscow, but never lost his gift for betrayal. In 1949, Frank Weeks, fair-haired boy of the newly formed CIA, was exposed as a Communist spy and fled the country to vanish

DefectorsCold War EraEspionageThriller
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Topaz

Leon Uris · 352 pages

On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, American and French intelligence agents are plunged into a maze of Cold War intrigue In Paris, 1962, French intelligence chief André Devereaux and NATO intelligence chief Michael Nordstrom have uncovered Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms to Cuba. But when Devereaux reports his findings and nobody acts—and he is targeted in an assassination attempt—he soon re

DefectorsCold War EraEspionageThriller
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The Last Frontier

Alistair MacLean · 319 pages

Doctor Jennings, a scientist in possession of a precious secret, has gone over to the Soviet Union, and British secret agent Michael Reynolds must get him back. Penetrating the Iron Curtain is difficult, but to bring out a man who is elderly and well-known seems impossible in the face of the secret police--until Reynolds discovers there are Hungarian patriots ready to help.

DefectorsCold War EraEspionageThriller
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The Trinity Six

Charles Cumming · 460 pages

Europe is still littered with the darkest secrets of the Cold War. And the most deadly revelation of them all is about to be made! Hard-up Russia expert Dr Sam Gaddis finally has a lead for a book that could set his career back on track. He has staggering new information about an unknown sixth member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring -- a man who has evaded detection for his entire life. But when

DefectorsEspionageCold War EraLondon
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The Company

Robert Littell · 894 pages

From the back cover: Welcome to the Company - better known as the CIA to outsiders. With a sharp eye for the pathos and absurdity of the spy game, internationally renowned novelist Robert Littell seamlessly weaves together history and fiction to create a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga that races across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the 1950s, the Soviet invasion

DefectorsCold War EraEspionageThriller
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The Cardinal of the Kremlin

Tom Clancy · 626 pages

Two men possess vital data on Russia's Star Wars missile defense system. One of them is CARDINAL—America's highest agent in the Kremlin—and he's about to be terminated by the KGB. The other is the one American who can save CARDINAL and lead the world to the brink of peace…or war. Here is author Tom Clancy's heart-stopping masterpiece. A riveting novel of the most important issue of our time.

DefectorsCold War EraEspionageThriller
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The Berlin Conspiracy

Tom Gabbay · 320 pages

"Jack Teller is through with the CIA--until the Berlin station is contacted by a Colonel in the East German Stasi just days before President John F. Kennedy's scheduled visit to the Wall. The Stasi officer has an important message--and he will speak to no one but Jack"--Publisher description.

Cold War EraDefectorsEspionageThriller
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From Russia With Love

Ian Fleming · 258 pages

James Bond is marked for death by the Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH in Ian Fleming’s masterful spy thriller, and the novel that President John F. Kennedy named one of his favourite books of all time. SMERSH stands for ‘Death to Spies’ and there’s no secret agent they’d like to disgrace and destroy more than 007, James Bond. But ensnaring the British Secret Service’s most lethal opera

Cold War EraDefectorsEspionageThriller
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Dancer

Colum McCann · 352 pages

A Russian peasant who became an international legend, a Cold War exile who inspired millions, an artist whose name stood for genius, sex, and excess--the magnificence of Rudolf Nureyev's life and work are known, but in this novel McCann reinvents this erotically charged figure, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection, through the light he cast on those who knew him. S

DefectorsCold War EraCharacter-DrivenLiterary 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 EraEspionageLondonCharacter-Driven
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera · 314 pages

A young woman obsessed with a man torn between his love for her and his womanizing; one of his mistresses and her faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel.

Cold War EraSlow-PacedBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Black Swan Green

David Mitchell · 344 pages

A novel. From hardcover: "Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen l

Cold War EraSlow-PacedBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Stieg Larsson · 602 pages

> Lisbeth Salander—the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels—lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have t

DefectorsEspionageSlow-PacedCold War Era
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The Orphan Master's Son

Adam Johnson · 456 pages

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is giv

DefectorsEspionageCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
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Snow Hunters

Paul Yoon · 196 pages

It is 1954 and the story traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life on the coast of Brazil. Throughout his years there, four people slip in and out of his life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named

DefectorsSlow-PacedBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Agent in Place

Helen MacInnes · 318 pages

A small team of specialists moves to counter a Soviet intelligence coup and to save the life of an espionage agent.

Cold War EraDefectorsEspionageThriller
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Hidden Prey

John Sandford · 393 pages

Det. Lucas Davenport has battled some real demons over the past 15 Prey novels and drifted in and out of lust and love with a host of women. But now he's happily married to the lovely Weather; has a nine month old son, Sam; and takes care of his 12-year old ward, Letty West.

DefectorsCold War EraEspionageThriller
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You Are One of Them

Elliott Holt · 293 pages

Sarah Zuckerman is a shy, wary ten-year-old in a seemingly placid, upscale neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. In Sarah's unhappy home her mother is agoraphobic and obsessed with the possibility of nuclear war; her father has abandoned the family to return to his native England. Sarah's prospects brighten, however, when she is befriended by Jenny Jones, an all-Amer

Cold War EraBittersweetEspionageCharacter-Driven
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Waiting

Ha Jin · 308 pages

For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold

Cold War EraSlow-PacedBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy

Elizabeth Kiem · 264 pages

After a harrowing defection to the United States in 1982, Russian teenager Marya and her father settle in Brooklyn, where Marya is drawn into a web of intrigue involving her gift of foresight, her mother's disappearance, and a boy she cannot bring herself to trust.

DefectorsCold War EraEspionage

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