Robert Littell Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. If Israel Lost the War (1969)
  2. The Defection of A.J. Lewinter (1973)
  3. Sweet Reason (1974)
  4. The October Circle (1976)
  5. Mother Russia (1978)
  6. The Debriefing (1979)
  7. The Amateur (1981)
  8. The Sisters (1985)
  9. The Revolutionist (1988)
  10. The Once and Future Spy (1990)
  11. An Agent in Place (1992)
  12. The Visiting Professor (1993)
  13. Walking Back the Cat (1997)
  14. The Company (2002)
  15. Legends (2005)
  16. Vicious Circle (2006)
  17. The Stalin Epigram (2009)
  18. Young Philby (2011)
  19. A Nasty Piece of Work (2013)
  20. The Mayakovsky Tapes (2016)
  21. Vladimir M. (2017)
  22. Comrade Koba (2020)

Picture Books In Publication Order

  1. Left and Right with Lion and Ryan (1969)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. For the Future of Israel (With: Shimon Peres) (1998)

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Robert Littell Books Overview

The Defection of A.J. Lewinter

The legendary spy thriller from bestselling author Robert Littell whose latest book The Company received rave reviews and acclaim and became an international bestseller is finally back in print. The Defection of A. J. Lewinter is a masterpiece of irony and intrigue, an unconventional and gripping anatomy of a defection. A.J. Lewinter is an American scientist, for years an insignificant cog in America’s complex defence machinery. While at an academic conference in Tokyo, he contacts the KGB station chief and tells him 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. Each side struggles to anticipate its opponents next move and the superpowers are locked in a deadly contest that exploits friendships, destroys loyalties, and manipulates human beings as expendable pawns. Deft and dazzlingly plotted, this is the book that introduced Robert Littell the opening shot of a brilliant career.

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 Carr , 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.

The Debriefing

A terrifying excursion into the ambiguous world of deceit, illusion, and treachery that is espionage by best selling master of the genre, Robert Littell. 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.

The Amateur

With last year’s publication of his New York Times bestseller The Company, Robert Littell reestablished his position as one of our top writers of intelligent, ironic, and always entertaining espionage thrillers. After many years The Amateur, a cult classic among aficionados, is finally available again as Overlook republishes Littell’s best. In this ‘first rate thriller’ Chicago Tribune, Charlie Heller is an ace cryptographer for the Company. He’s a quiet man with a quiet job in a back office. But when terrorists shoot his fianc e in cold blood and Heller learns that the Agency has decided not to pursue those responsible, his life takes an abrupt turn. He was not a blackmailer but he will force the CIA’s hand. He was not an assassin but he will penetrate the Iron Curtain with the intent to kill. Driven by an obsessive need for revenge, targeted for elimination by the CIA itself, Heller is an amateur with a one in a million chance of success.

The Sisters

With last year’s publication of his New York Times bestseller The Company, Robert Littell re established his position as one of our top writers of intelligent, ironic, and always entertaining espionage thrillers. After many years The Sisters, a cult classic among espionage aficionados is finally available again as Overlook republishes this classic spy story by Littell, whose most recent novel The Company received acclaim across the nation. 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 proteg from committing The Sisters‘ perfect and world shattering crime.

The Revolutionist

An epic saga of the Soviet Union’s brutal first decades from The New York Times bestselling master of espionage. Hailed as ‘the American le Carr ,’ Robert Littell presents an ambitious novel about star crossed idealist Alexander Til. When Til returns from America to Petrograd on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917, it is to put his life on the line in the hope of transforming Russia. But after witnessing the birth of a new era, he watches the people, and his own ideals, trampled by the rise of Josef Stalin with whom Til is destined to have a shattering confrontation. Taking readers from the storming of the Winter Palace to the nightmares of the gulag, The Revolutionist is a masterwork of historical fiction.

The Once and Future Spy

Robert Littell is a master storyteller of the highest caliber in the ranks of John le Carr , 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.

An Agent in Place

With An Agent in Place, Robert Littell proves once again that he is a master storyteller in the ranks of John le Carr , Len Deighton, and Graham Greene. Deep in the vastness of the Pentagon and the bowels of the massive KGB center in Moscow are old Cold Warriors who refuse to fade away. Yet how can they wage their battles when there are no enemies anymore? Their answer is Ben Bassett. Sent to Moscow as a lowly embassy housekeeper, Bassett meets a fiercely independent, passionate Russian poet, A da Zavaskaya, and falls under her spell. Together they become pawns in a dreadful game that leads to the clandestine heart of the Soviet system itself.

The Visiting Professor

A delicious post cold war romp, The Visiting Professor is another classic page tuner for the many fans that have come to recognize Robert Littell thanks to The Company and its recent TNT miniseries as a thriller writer on par with John le Carr and Alan Furst. Lemuel Falk, ‘a Russian theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos,’ has applied for permission to leave Russia every year for the past twenty three years. Unexpectedly, his twenty fourth request is approved and he accepts a chair as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos Related Studies in upstate New York. As soon as he arrives, he is plunged into another kind of chaos an academic catfight, an affair with a much younger hairdresser, and a dangerous serial killer.

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.

The Company

With a sharp eye for the pathos and absurdity of the Cold War, Robert Littell crafted his first novel, the now legendary spy thriller The Defection of A.J. Lewinter. Christopher Lehmann Haupt of The New York Times called it ‘a perfect little gem, the best Cold War thriller I’ve read in years,’ and the praise kept coming with critics hailing Littell as ‘the American Le Carr&eacute’ New York Times and raving that his books were ‘as good as thriller writing gets’ The Washington Post. For his fourteenth novel, Robert Littell creates an engrossing, multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic yet utterly candid saga, bringing to life through a host of characters historical and imagined the over 40 years of the CIA ‘The Company‘ to insiders. At the heart of the novel is a stunningly conceived mole hunt involving such rivals and allies as the MI6, KGB, and Mossad. Racing across a canvas that spans the legendary Berlin Base in the 1950s the front line of the simmering Cold War to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, the Afghan war, the Gorbachev putsch, and other major theatres of operation for the CIA, The Company tells a thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that was amoral, elusive, formidable. Littell tells it like it was: CIA agents, fighting not only the good fight, but sometimes the bad one as well. Littell also brilliantly lays bare the warring within The Company to add another dimension to the spy vs. spy game: the battles between the counterintelligence agents in Washington, like the utterly obsessive real life mole hunter James Angleton, and the covert action boys in the field, like The Company‘s Harvey Torriti the Sorcerer a brilliant and brash rule breaker and dirty tricks expert who fights fire with fire, and his Apprentice, Jack McAuliffe, recruited fresh out of Yale, who learns tradecraft and the hard truths of life in the field. As this dazzling anatomy of the CIA unfolds, nothing less than the world’s future in the second half of the twentieth century is at stake. At once a celebration of a long Cold War well fought, an elegy for the end of an era, and a reckoning for a profession in which moral ambiguity created a wilderness of mirrors, The Company is the Cold War’s devastating truth, its entertaining tale, its last word.

Legends

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.

Vicious Circle

An Israeli government minister is assassinated in the home of his mistress. Days later, Elihu, an aging and decorated Mossad officer, leads his final combat mission, killing a Hamas leader in his bed and barely escaping with his life. Out of this familiarly cyclical scenario emerges what is perhaps Robert Littell’s most heartfelt and suspenseful novel. The action moves into the near future, when the global community, united under the leadership of a visionary female president of the United States, brokers a major compromise between Israel and the Palestinian authority in the hopes of snuffing out the violent flashpoint that fuels the flames of global terrorism. But then, Isaac Apfulbaum, a well known fundamentalist Rabbi, is taken hostage by Dr. al Saath, a legendary Palestinian terrorist, who demands the release of scores of high level Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for his captive. Elihu, now directing the interagency intelligence team hunting for Apfulbaum s captors, finds himself tracking a familiar and elusive enemy. As the Israelis slowly close in on their pray, the hostage and the hostage taker sparring through grueling all night interrogation sessions become caught up in an extraordinary relationship; parallels between these battle scarred partisans evolve in to bizarre bonds and a terrifying alliance. Israel, Palestine and the international community are united behind the effort to end the hostage crisis, but has the Vicious Circle already been closed? Ferociously suspenseful and brilliantly topical, Vicious Circle is a thriller that, like The Company before it, exposes the heart of an entire culture of violence by probing the corrupted consciences of the men and woman ensnared within it.

The Stalin Epigram

The Stalin Epigram is a masterful rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia’s greatest poets of the twentieth century. His heroic protest against the Stalin regime particularly his outspoken criticism of the collectivization that drove millions of Russian peasants to starvation finally reached its apex in 1934. When he composed a searing indictment of Stalin in a sixteen line poem, secretly passed from person to person through recitation, the poet was arrested. It is widely accepted that Stalin himself was directly involved in Mandelstam’s exile and his death in a Siberian transit camp in 1938.A master of historical detail and cultural authenticity, bestselling author Robert Littell based this novel in part on a memorable, intimate meeting with Mandelstam’s wife in 1979. Narrated by Mandelstam’s wife, his friends Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, and Mandelstam himself, this lucid account of the relationships between the artists, politicians, and proletariat of Stalinist Russia is an astounding moment in history brought to life by a perceptive, immensely talented writer.

Left and Right with Lion and Ryan

In order to keep his job in the circus, Ryan must teach Lion the difference between left and right, so the reader learns with Lion which side is which.

For the Future of Israel (With: Shimon Peres)

One of the greatest recent moments in the annals of peace during a century deeply marred by war and its atrocities was the handshake between longtime enemies Yitzak Rabin and Yassir Arafat in Washington, D.C., in 1993. Signifying a new era for the Middle East, the handshake was the public culmination of painstaking negotiations carried out by Shimon Peres, then Foreign Minister of Israel, and Palestinian representatives in Oslo, Norway. For their efforts, Rabin, Peres, and Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. May, 1998, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Israel. For the Future of Israel reveals the character of a leader who participated in the birth of his country and whose thoughts remain ever on the future on the basis and prospects for peace. In five conversations with novelist and former Newsweek correspondent Robert Littell, Peres reflects on his youth in shtetl and kibbutz, the impact of the Holocaust on world affairs, what it means to be a Jew, and the ongoing struggle to end terrorism and forge peace between Israel and its neighbors. Completed in late 1996 and 1997, the interviews reflect the changed state of Israel since the assassination of Yitzak Rabin after which Peres was named Prime Minister and Defense Minister and the subsequent election of a Likud led government in Israel and its renegotiation of aspects of the Oslo agreements. Peres speaks candidly of his negotiations with Arafat and of his close, complementary relationship with Rabin. Ranging widely over the last fifty years, he ponders the effect of the occupation of the territories on the character of his country. He gives his views on public figures he has known among them Ben Gurion, Mitterand, Reagan, Netanyahu, Yeltsin, and Clinton, the qualities of good leadership, and the dangers of fundamentalism and religious parties. He describes his approach to negotiations, one that sharply contrasts with those who believe that the terms of peace must be dictated: ‘To achieve peace, you cannot impose your position or any position you have to urge parties to come to a position.’He conveys his belief that the future of peace for Israel lies in replacing the unifying force of war with the unifying strength of a constitution and ethics. This book is Peres’ testament to the highest qualities of Israel and a thorough presentation of his deeply considered views on what must be done to preserve the country’s spiritual and political aspirations.

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