100 books like Sweet Tooth

John Banville is a famously prolific author, but his 1997 novel, The Untouchable, is unique in that it’s based on a real-life figure.

Anthony Blunt—who would later be exposed as one of the notorious Cambridge spies—rose to become an art expert to the Queen, even as he funneled purloined secrets to the highest reaches of the Kremlin. 

In The Untouchable, we follow Blunt’s fictional counterpart, Victor Maskell, from his poor Irish upbringing and conversion to Marxism at Cambridge, to his efforts on behalf of the Soviet Union well into the Cold War.

Victor’s first-person account—a miracle of authorly ventriloquism for a character bordering on the sociopathic—is rendered in Banville’s silky prose, a pure delight to read. For me, The Untouchable is a novel for the ages.

The sins and tragedies of the Cold War are resurrected in Le Carré’s late-career novel, A Legacy of Spies.

After retiring from MI6, Peter Guillam is summoned back to London by his former bosses, intent on clearing up a botched spy operation first described in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. 

A Legacy of Spies shows that a story revolving around bureaucratic turf wars and incriminating paper trails can be just as suspenseful as any of James Bond’s implausible high-tech adventures.

George Smiley, among the 20th century’s most compelling fictional characters, makes a guest appearance, drawing us back into the Cold War’s darkest days, when men and women served as pawns in a geopolitical power game—and often paid the price for their role in these international dramas. 

This is the first book in a nine-book series, and once again, these are books I read and read again and always find something new to enjoy.

Set towards the end of the Cold War, the books make me laugh as well as think. In planning the series, Deighton said he wanted to write about Samson’s marriage and how the relationship is impacted by the work. I found this a compelling idea and it’s something I’ve done in my new book. I’m not sure that Len Deighton was a spy himself, but he certainly knew a few.

This group of interconnected stories—set mostly in Russia and Chechnya—take place before, during, and after the Cold War. In the opening story, “The Leopard,” Anthony Marra perfectly captures the suffocating terror of life under Stalin. 

The narrator is a disillusioned Soviet censor whose job is editing images of disgraced victims of Stalinist show trials out of official photographs and despoiling many other works of art for propaganda purposes.

Lines between work and life start to blur. The censor finds it increasingly hard to discern fact from fiction.

Things turn deadly when he himself becomes a victim and the truth (as he knows it) becomes irrelevant in the struggle against counter-revolutionaries.

From these troubled origins the Cold War began. The ability to discern truth from falsehood seems in our present times more pressing than ever.

As someone who writes about the Cold War, I loved this thrilling novel of espionage and secrecy. The Secrets We Kept follows women in the CIA who helped smuggle the novel Dr. Zhivago out of the Soviet Union. Not only is a story of resilient female spies (who make me want to don trench coats and sunglasses), but it’s a love story—and it sheds light on an under-represented dark spot in American history known as the “lavender scare.” Haven’t heard of that? Well, this book may be perfect for you.

A few years ago I spoke at the London History Festival alongside Nadine Akkerman, and we realised how much the female spies of 17c Britain and the Second World War had in common, not only conveniently overlooked in their own day, but also disregarded subsequently. This brilliant study explores the gendered dimension of early modern spycraft.

I had to skim several sections of this nonfiction book because it was tough for me to process all the brutal, unrelenting details of how real women have been mistreated and mishandled by Western intelligence services.

But I came away with a more complete sense of what it takes to work in espionage and how necessary it is to understand exactly what you’re fighting for when every day can be a neverending shitshow.

Also, the title definitely pays off, so hang in there if you can, reader.

McIntosh takes a fresh approach to espionage, putting aside the trench coats and Mata Haris for the real "Code-room Mata Hari" and other little-known heroines of the war. A veteran of CIA and OSS operations herself, McIntosh knows what she's writing about, and draws from more than 100 interviews with other women operatives. She portrays several dozen here, including the China escapades of Julia McWilliams (known today as Julia Child). It also features the Musac project, with broadcasts targeted at Wehrmacht troops with fake German news and music sung by agent Marlene Dietrichn designed to infiltrate their sympathies.

I’d always imagined the femme fatale, Mata Hari, as the female spy of WWI, but in this well-researched book by Tammy Proctor, I was fascinated to learn there were quite a few women agents in the Great War. Proper ladies, in long dress skirts or nurses’ uniforms, each playing her part in a dangerous game of subterfuge against the enemy to help the Allies win. They knew the risks, yet were willing to sacrifice their lives for what they saw as the greater good; and it was these women who inspired me to create the heroine in my book, Evelyn Marche. Her bravery and daring in the novel are a tribute to them.

This is an incredible story about the young Marita Lorenz who falls in love with Fidel Castro one month after the Cuban Revolution and then gets persuaded by the CIA to try and assassinate him. Marita Lorenz was a spy for the CIA, had a child with at least one Latin American dictator and several lovers among the New York Mafia. That much we know, but it’s up to you if you believe her take on the JFK assassination. As she puts it herself at the beginning of the book: “I have been a woman in a man’s world. I have lied to protect myself and my children and I have told the truth when it suited me. Now I want to leave things clear”.