Let’s be frank: being a spy-thriller aficionado means occasionally having to put up with bad writing for the sake of a good plot. Not every former intelligence officer wields a sentence like John le Carré. Hell, few writers do, and that’s okay. If you, like me, gravitate toward the genre’s “grounded” end, where the politics are real and the escapades real-ish, authenticity will always outweigh style.
Of course, all of us have our red lines. Just last month, I stopped reading an acclaimed spy novel four pages in, because the author had used the word “disinterested” as a synonym for “bored” (it means “unbiased”). I didn’t learn English from scratch in my teens to cut my colleagues this much slack. A guy’s got to have standards.
Luckily, we don’t always have to choose. There is a whole world of books out there that work both as excellent spy thrillers and good literature, delivering all the clandestine kicks while treating the reader as an actual adult. Here are some of my favorites.
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Lea Carpenter, Ilium
Behind a cheeky le Carré epigraph (“Then the new style began”) lies a well-observed first-person novel about falling in love with an older man…who then recruits you to entrap a Russian oligarch with a killer past. With a relatable amateur agent at its center, discovering tradecraft and its attendant moral ambiguities as she goes, it is a great transitional text for the romance-minded but espionage-curious.
Jonathan Payne, Citizen Orlov
A fishmonger bumbles his way into a royal assassination plot in a silly yet hyperliterate sendup of both Kafka and Graham Greene. The setting—a made-up Eastern European backwater that feels about eighty percent Czech—is half the fun, but, amazingly, the madcap plot with its innumerable twists works on its own, too. The result is a hoot and a half that practically begs to be a Wes Anderson film.
(There’s even a sequel, Hotel Melikov, which I haven’t read yet).
Sergei Lebedev, Untraceable
Every country has one writer who is somehow better known abroad than at home, and Lebedev is Russia’s: I seem to encounter him in translation only. Which makes sense, considering the topic of Untraceable. This dark, queasy novel goes straight for the horrible heart of Russia’s black ops—the old Soviet bioweapons program that resulted in the real-world poisonings of Alexei Navalny and others.
Its original title, Debutant, is an obvious play on the nerve agent novichok (“newbie”); another way Lebedev’s work only seems to improve in English.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks openly about growing up between two cultures—never feeling “American” enough for the U.S. yet so terrified of his homeland that he wouldn’t visit it for decades (a sentiment I find more than relatable). This novel, about a half-French, half-Vietnamese double agent who spies on his own wherever he goes, takes that unmoored state and stretches it to glorious extremes.
The HBO series, with Robert Downey Jr. playing multiple roles in absurd makeup, was sadly a mess; I’d advise you to head straight for the Pulitzer-winning source.
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
McEwan’s second spy-adjacent outing (after 1990’s The Innocent, also very good) is, like Ilium, a first-person tale of a recruitment. This time, our protagonist, Serena Frome—now there’s a name to make you immediately fall in love—is pulled into MI5’s clandestine program to fund the ideologically “correct” writers.
A satire, a love story, and a study of the uniquely 1970s’ drab and dread, it all builds to a brain-scrambling final twist that lands somewhere between Tinker Tailor and Nabokov. A masterpiece.
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