Deze Amerikaanse auteur, woonachtig in Frankrijk, specialiseert zich in spionageromans die zich vaak richten op de CIA en de Sovjet-Unie. Zijn jarenlange ervaring als journalist voor Newsweek tijdens de Koude Oorlog gaf hem een diepgaand inzicht in de geopolitieke intriges die hij vervolgens in zijn werken verwerkte. Zijn vertelstijl is vaak spannend en vol wendingen, wat de realiteit van geheime operaties en de morele dilemma's van de personages weerspiegelt. Naast zijn literaire werk is hij ook een fervent bergbeklimmer, wat zijn vermogen om spanning op te bouwen en uitdagende situaties te beschrijven, kan beïnvloeden.
Wanneer Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky en Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt II gerekruteerd worden als agent voor de CIA komen ze in een andere wereld terecht. Ze zullen hun dagen slijten in dubbellevens en leren omgaan met de gewetenswroeging die voortkomt uit de kennis van gruwelijke plannen en geheimen. Gebonden aan de wet en vaak gehinderd door de luimen van de Amerikaanse president vechten ze mee in de Koude Oorlog, met een stijfkoppige toewijding die aan het ongelooflijke grenst.
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 toppling of legitimate governments. Behind every manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, however, one question remains, which spans the length of the book . . . Who is the mole within the CIA? An astonishing novel that captures the life-and-death struggle of an entire generation of CIA operatives during a long Cold War. ‘The best American spy writer currently at work’ Daily Telegraph
Deep in the vastness of the Pentagon and the bowels of the massive KGB center in Moscow are old cold war warriors who refuse to fade away. Enter Ben Bassett - a novice diplomat newly dispatched to Moscow with a top secret security clearance and the paradoxical status of low level "housekeeper." Soon after his arrival, Bassett meets the fiercely independent, passionate Russian poet, Aida Zavaskaya, and falls under her spell. Together they become pawns in a dreadful plot whose ultimate goal is to return to the terrible past - and whose opening stakes are the life of her child. A prophetic tale of international suspense, An Agent in Place is also a love story, and an intricate novel of human character and moral responsibility.
Moscow, March 1953: As Stalin breathes his last, four women meet in Room 408 of the luxurious hotel Metropol. They have gathred to reminisce about the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose work they once inspired. Following his mysterious suicide twenty-five years earlier, he was canonised by Stalin - but in life he was a farmore complicated man, violently torn between art and politics. As his muses piece together their conflicting memories of the man, a portrait of the artist as a tormented young idealist emerges, revealing him as a sexual obsessive caught in the eye of history's storm, struggling to hold on to his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed. In Vladimir M., Robert Littell creates a provocative cocktail of fiction and reality, bringing to life the tumultuous Stalinist era and the disaster it spelt for the artists it ensnared.
Lemuel Falk, a Russian theoretical chaoticist, accepts a position as a visiting professor at an upstate New York university, and a sexy hairdresser and a killer on the loose make his life utter chaos. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.
A award-winning, psychological post-Cold War novel--adapted as a TNT series starring Sean Bean--Legends is the next blockbuster spy novel from Robert Littell. 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 multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Widely considered one of the true grand masters of American spy fiction, Robert Littell shifts focus from the broad Cold War canvas of his international bestseller The Company to the life of a single CIA operative caught in a contradictory "wilderness of mirrors" in which remembering the past and forgetting it are both deadly options. From unforgettable opening to astonishing ending, Legends again proves Littell's unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller.
In the turbulent Middle East, fundamentalist Rabbi Isaac Apfulbaum is taken hostage by Palestinian terrorist Dr. al-Saath who is asking for the release of many Palestinian political prisoners.
Former homicide detective and CIA agent Lemuel Gunn left behind the Afghanistan battlefield for a trailer in New Mexico to forge a new career as a private investigator. Out of nowhere comes Ornella Neppi, a woman making a mess of her uncle's bail bonds business. She asks Gunn to track down the source of her troubles, a man named Emilio Gava, who has jumped bail after being arrested for buying cocaine. But no photos of Gava seem to exist. As Gunn begins his search for a man it seems that someone is protecting, hitting dead end after dead end, he starts to suspect that Gava might not exist at all...
A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell Leon 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 where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work, Leon starts to explore. One day, after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet official with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. In this taut and layered novel, New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell deploys his deep knowledge of this complex period in Russian history and masterful talent for captivating storytelling to create a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing Stalin’s human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible narrator—and not unlike Holden Caulfield, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.
A thrilling tale of the most infamous double-agent in history. 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 named Harold Adrian Russell Philby. He tried to imagine the life that awaited him in the Soviet Union. Would Moscow Centre welcome him as a senior Soviet intelligence officer?
