Here are 7 books that A Constellation of Vital Phenomena fans have personally recommended if you like
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
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Peter Allison became a safari guide by accident. Healthy fear is outweighed by overwhelming curiosity, which has led to misadventures on all continents, detailed in the books Whatever You Do, Don’t Run (A New York Times Notable Book of the Year); Don’t Look Behind You; and How To Walk A Puma.
Godwin’s brilliant memoir of growing up in what was then Southern Rhodesia, fighting in a war, then defending as a lawyer some of those who he’d fought against is told with enormous wit and great literary flair. It’s a travesty that no film has ever been made of this book, but perhaps no one would believe the stories.
Mukiwa opens with Peter Godwin, six years old, describing the murder of his neighbor by African guerillas, in 1964, pre-war Rhodesia. Godwin's parents are liberal whites, his mother a governement-employed doctor, his father an engineer. Through his innocent, young eyes, the story of the beginning of the end of white rule in Africa unfolds. The memoir follows Godwin's personal journey from the eve of war in Rhodesia to his experience fighting in the civil war that he detests to his adventures as a journalist in the new state of Zimbabwe, covering the bloody return to Black rule. With each transition…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Beautifully lyrical writing that conjures civil war America and an Irish lad’s immersion in it and gives moments of extraordinary tenderness amongst the brutality.
"A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making."—Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant
From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, “a master storyteller” (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars
Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the…
I readTinker Tailor Soldier Spyfor the first time many years ago, while traveling aboard a Canadian National Railway train from Montreal to British Columbia. Something about the contrast between the majestic Canadian Rockies and the dark alleys of John Le Carré’s Berlin brought the Cold War fully to life and set me on the path to writing a novel of my own set during that time. (Living through some of those tense years of superpower stand-offs didn’t hurt.) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spyis told in third-person, but many Cold War novels written in the first person do a masterful job of evoking that troubled era.
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 Untouchable is an engrossing, exquisitely written and almost bewilderingly smart book . . . It's the fullest book I've read in a very long time, utterly accomplished, thoroughly readable, written by a novelist of vast talent' Richard Ford
Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons and the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his disgrace is public, his knighthood revoked, his position as curator of the Queen's pictures terminated. There are questions to be answered. For whom has he been sacrificed? To what has he sacrificed his life?
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
The undisputed master returns with his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years--a #1 New York Times bestseller and ideal holiday gift.
Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters…
I’ve been into spy stories for many years. I love the intrigue, the deception, the secrecy of that world. Of course, real spying may involve lots of periods of doing nothing, possibly followed by manic, dangerous action. All while dealing with the anxiety of hiding the fact that you might be a traitor to your country or simply not the person the world thinks you are. It’s a fascinating world, and that fascination is what draws me in.
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.
'Masterly ... dazzlingly intelligent and subtle' Sunday Times
'Deighton's best novel to date - sharp, witty and sour, like Raymond Chandler adapted to British gloom and the multiple betrayals of the spy' Observer
Embattled agent Bernard Samson is used to being passed over for promotion as his younger, more ambitious colleagues - including his own wife Fiona - rise up the ranks of MI6. When a valued agent in East Berlin warns the British of a mole at the heart of the Service, Samson must return to the field and the city he loves to uncover the traitor's identity. This…
I readTinker Tailor Soldier Spyfor the first time many years ago, while traveling aboard a Canadian National Railway train from Montreal to British Columbia. Something about the contrast between the majestic Canadian Rockies and the dark alleys of John Le Carré’s Berlin brought the Cold War fully to life and set me on the path to writing a novel of my own set during that time. (Living through some of those tense years of superpower stand-offs didn’t hurt.) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spyis told in third-person, but many Cold War novels written in the first person do a masterful job of evoking that troubled era.
From this novel’s opening lines—“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service”—Ian McEwan draws readers into the dreary and yet ominous world of Cold War England, circa 1974.
The story purrs along like a well-oiled machine. Serena has an affair with an older man that ends badly, but not before her ex-lover sets her on an eventful career path with MI5.
Soon she’s recruited for an operation called “Sweet Tooth,” in which government channels funds are channeled to “acceptable” novelists so they can counter the effects of Soviet propaganda.
In McEwan’s skillfully crafted prose and narrative power, we’re plunged deep inside this undercover world.
The year is 1972, the Cold War is far from over and Serena Frome, in her final year at Cambridge, is being groomed for MI5. Sent on Operation Sweet Tooth - a highly secret undercover mission - she meets Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage - trust no one.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I readTinker Tailor Soldier Spyfor the first time many years ago, while traveling aboard a Canadian National Railway train from Montreal to British Columbia. Something about the contrast between the majestic Canadian Rockies and the dark alleys of John Le Carré’s Berlin brought the Cold War fully to life and set me on the path to writing a novel of my own set during that time. (Living through some of those tense years of superpower stand-offs didn’t hurt.) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spyis told in third-person, but many Cold War novels written in the first person do a masterful job of evoking that troubled era.
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.
*** A Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017 ***
The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images due to be altered. The mystery behind this painting threads together the stories that follow, which take us through a century and introduce a cast of characters including a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau,…
