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 Carré" (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-his...

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 pr...

This realistic New York Times–bestselling epic spy novel captures the thrilling story of CIA agents in the latter half of the Twentieth Century.The New York Times bestselling spy novel The Company lays bare the history and inner workings of the CIA. This critically acclaimed blockbuster from internationally renowned novelist Robert Littell seamlessly weaves together history and fiction to create a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga...

A brand-new novel from New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell, A Plague on Both Your Houses is a thrilling tale of love and war.On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a ten-minute televised speech announcing his resignation as Soviet president. Moments later, with little pomp and less circumstance, the red flag was lowered from its floodlit perch atop the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.Into the vacuum—...

A riveting thriller about an ordinary man's quest for extraordinary vengeanceCharlie Heller is a cryptographer not a spy, let alone an assassin. But the murder of his fiancée and the failure of the CIA to follow up on the case makes everything different. Heller uses his contacts to get behind the Iron Curtain himself and to pursue the three men who killed her.The Amateur is a richly enjoyable thriller. Heller is a total amateur. He is very clever b...

A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert LittellLeon Rozental—ten and a half, intellectually precocious, and possessing a disarming candor—is suddenly alone after the death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors. Now on his own and hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, the massive building in Moscow w...

A Brooklyn P.I. and ex-CIA agent looks for a missing man while suffering from an identity crisis in this thriller by the bestselling author of The Company.Martin Odum is a onetime CIA field agent turned private detective in Brooklyn, struggling his way through a labyrinth of memories and past identities—"legends" in Agency parlance. But who is Martin Odum? Is he a creation of the Legend Committee at the CIA's Langley headquarters? Is he suffering from multi...

In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure.The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a portrait of the artist as a young idea...

"A dizzying, 'what if' take on (in)famous British spy Kim Philby. . . . pulse-quickening epic scenes of conflict . . . A Cold-War spy novel for the top shelf." — Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewWhen Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most notorious double agent in the history of espionage. Recruited into His Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service at the beginning of World War II, he rose rapidly in the ranks to become the chief liaison officer wi...

An engrossing, multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic yet utterly entertaining and candid saga, bringing to life through a host of characters – historical and imagined – nearly fifty years of this secretive and powerful organization.Intelligent and ironic, Littell tells it like it was: CIA agents fighting not only the ‘good fight’ against foreign enemies, but sometimes the bad fight too. The ends justify such means as CIA-organized assassinations, covert wars, kidnappings, and the t...

One midnight in January in the early 1960s, the Russian freighter Domatova quietly slipped out of Beirut harbour. The ship had sailed with a single passenger on board: an Englishman named Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed Kim. He had fled the Lebanese capital with little more than the clothes on his back. The Englishman had used both hardcover and paperback edition of James Hilton's Lost Horizon for enciphering purposes (page, line and letter number) when he had communicated with his...

A brand-new novel from New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell, A Plague on Both Your Houses is a thrilling tale of love and war.On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a ten-minute televised speech announcing his resignation as Soviet president. Moments later, with little pomp and less circumstance, the red flag was lowered from its floodlit perch atop the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.Into the vacuum—...