207 books like George Smiley

This book takes a comic yet piercing look at espionage. 

Jim Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Cuba, is recruited by MI6 out of desperation and fabricates his spy reports. He invents agents, sketches of weaponized vacuum parts, and absurd clandestine plots—all to keep the money coming and satisfy his daughter’s extravagances.

What makes the novel shine is its satire of the spy apparatus—how credulity, vanity, and bureaucratic inertia turn fiction into danger. Greene balances light humor with real human stakes: financial strain, moral compromise, a man pretending to be something he is not. Even decades after its writing, Our Man in Havana remains sharp, funny, and deeply relevant in its critique of power, truth, and illusion.

This is both your main course and palate cleanser. Absolutely riveting!

I find Tom Ripley such a wonderful character—a con man who commits crimes under the guise of someone else, a male protagonist written by a lesbian.

I love the levels of deception the reader is pulled in, so is on the side of the criminal throughout, hoping for him not to get caught in his awful, amoral behaviour.

It is a masterful use of the narrative voice in crime fiction at its best.

I love this book because it captures the essence of cold war espionage when the wall was still up in Berlin. It’s a tale of a time in recent history that no longer exists. It’s written with humour, the characters are well represented, and it’s believable in an English, often eccentric way.

Each book in this series is about the illusions we create and live with, depicted through a team of rejected British spies.

When a M15 spy screws up an assignment they are transfer to the Slough House to waste away until they retire. That’s the premise, but it’s led by a master spy, who is entrenched in the highest levels of the spy world. You don’t know what is real or what is an illusion, as situations evolve.

It’s at times insane, the characters are unusual, and the situations are full of twists and turns, from the illogical to the unheard of. I loved every minute of each book.

I felt my net worth increase 25% just from reading this book, for Ian Fleming lavishes his world of French casinos and international crime in such opulence that you can feel the velvet smoking jacket slip over your shoulders with each turn of the page.

The debut of super-spy extraordinaire James Bond is so far removed from the celluloid pandemonium we all know and love that one would be forgiven for thinking MI6 veteran and fellow writer John le Carré was the real man behind the typewriter.

Fleming’s Bond is a cold, calculating career agent but also a human being, one with genuine weaknesses and failings that spoil the otherwise glamorous countenance of his operation but which also make the victories that much sweeter. Nobody does it better!

Ken Follett’s breakthrough novel is a taut and thrilling wartime espionage tale set during World War II. But there is sufficient naval action to include it in this list. I felt it was a wonderfully atmospheric novel.

It centres on Henry Faber, a ruthless German spy nicknamed “The Needle” for his deadly stiletto. Faber uncovers the Allies’ deception surrounding the D-Day invasion and races to deliver the intelligence to Nazi command. His journey leads him to Storm Island, where he encounters Lucy Rose, a lonely Englishwoman whose emotional entanglement with Faber becomes pivotal. As MI5 closes in, the novel builds to an exciting naval warfare climax.

Follett masterfully blends suspense, romance, and historical intrigue in this compelling tale of loyalty and betrayal.

Not exactly literary fiction, I know. And it breaks none of the rules governing the novelist’s craft. And we all read it back when it came out, didn't we? Or saw the movie, there've been a couple of versions...

So why is it on my list, you ask?

The Day of the Jackal is quite simply the greatest thriller ever written, and should be read by anyone who writes fiction, literary or otherwise—and by the rest of us as well.

Think for a moment: We follow The Jackal’s relentless quest to corner and kill French President Charles DeGaulle for 380 pages, waiting with breath bated to see whether he will succeed even though we know before we ever open the cover of the book (if we know even the slightest bit of history) that DeGaulle was never assassinated—ever!—not by The Jackal and not by anyone in… show more.

Another classic—this one, from 1955, which was twice made into a movie, in 1958 and in the superior 2002 remake, with Brendan Frazier and Michael Cain. The Quiet American is described as many things—as a Vietnam war book, as a critique of American imperialist impulses. But at heart, it’s the story of a love triangle.

And the woman at the center of the love triangle, Phuong, is an all-time favorite character of mine. With watchful attention and subtle silences, she dictates the fate of the two men. More important than anything we ever see her say are the things we see her do and not do. 

I love the novel’s spare prose and its observations and asides, which are astute and oftentimes quite funny. And in the book’s pages, Vietnam, in the years just before the disastrous French then American wars, comes vividly to life. But Phuong is the reason… show more.

Published in 2001, The Constant Gardener is my favorite le Carre Novel. A British diplomat in Nairobi, Justin Quayle, is informed his activist wife, Tess has been killed in a remote part of Kenya along with a doctor friend. As Quayle investigates her life (in a similar way to Eric Ambler unfolds Dimitrios’s life), he uncovers her work exposing large pharmaceutical companies’ unethical experiments in the poorest regions of Africa. This leads to her brutal death and cover-up at a diplomatic and political level. It is an exceptional book that makes you rethink how medicine and the industry behind it operates. After the collapse of the USSR, le Carre seemed to struggle with his work, The Constant Gardener though, kick-started another two decades of great writing from him.

I absolutely love the portrayal of a deeply flawed character thrown into the murky world of espionage. For me, Magnus Pym epitomizes the double standards of British and American society, desperate to protect themselves during the Cold War while revealing the inner conflict between self, family, and country.

I also love how the tension builds and builds as Pym, the double agent, rises through the Secret Service and risks everything.