98 Books Like A Duty of Care

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!

At first glance, Damascus Station seems like your generic airport filler.

The opening sequence may lack purpose and direction, and the prose is fragmented. It is an acquired taste, I suppose. But there are many redeeming qualities to this novel that make it an engaging and fulfilling read.

It is the product of a real-life intelligence officer who provides incredibly detailed insight on tradecraft and the less glamorous aspects of intelligence collection. The plot tightens as the conflict takes shape, and we end up being personally invested in the fate of our CIA protagonists and their shadowy contractors. 

There is a sense of closeness to the political backdrop of the Syrian state: although released in 2021, the themes of corruption, ethnic cleansing, and power imbalances resonate well with our current socioeconomic and geopolitical climate.

A must-read for any longtime fan of intelligence thrillers.

One of my biggest influences, John le Carré, has supplied a whole generation of readers with (mostly) Cold War-era thrillers that proved sharp, incisive, minutely constructed, and often fun (in a quintessentially British manner). 

A legend of the craft, le Carré fathered a child, Nick Harkaway, who happens to share the same predisposition for precise and compelling espionage stories with memorable dialogue. For those of you familiar with le Carré’s work, you’ve heard of George Smiley, one of his most recognizable characters—an anti-James Bond with a self-effacing persona and an unassuming stature who is, in fact, lethal and highly effective.

Karla’s Choice is his last adventure, penned by the master’s son himself. It is a tour de force in characterization and the relentless dissection of human nature and its unpredictable wanderings. Some of the best dialogue and tradecraft you’ll ever read, set against the backdrop of a developing Cold War… show more.

This book delivers refined espionage with depth and risk.

Former Moscow Station chief Alex Matthews is drawn back into agency politics when his old asset, Byron, may hold kompromat that could crash the White House. The tension is quiet and personal; betrayal, loss, and moral confusion pulse at its core. 

Vidich builds atmosphere with precision: the cold bureaucracy, Moscow’s shadows, and a man torn between patriotism and regret. In an era of fast-paced spy stories, this novel stands out for its emotional honesty, elegant plotting, and the real stakes for its characters. 

It’s a must-read in 2025, especially if you’re craving a literary challenge.

Compared to The Gulag Archipelago, this book is a breeze—check out how tiny it is! I love how it succinctly tells me pretty much everything I need to know about the Gulag, using all the latest research by historians who have accessed top-secret Soviet documents.

Barenberg excels at explaining the Soviet repressive system—why it was set up, what it aimed to accomplish, and how it was constantly changing. But he is equally strong at exploring the depth of suffering borne by millions of men, women, and children. 

In 1991, Mariusz Wilk, a Polish journalist long fascinated by the mysteries of the Russian soul, moved to the Solovki islands, a lonely archipelago amidst the far northern shores of Russia’s White Sea. He lived on one of these islands for seven years, and came to know every single one of its thousand residents. His sparse, heartfelt account of these islands that are dominated by the powerful interwoven forces of religion, politics, and the Arctic, is unconventional, and well worth the challenge. He pierces beneath the skin and the ice of this remote community and slowly begins to unravel the complexities and contradictions of Russia’s history and her landscapes.

To me, this is the best Gulag memoir ever written. It chronicles in gripping detail the process of arrest, prison, trial, transportation, and finally, the camps that Ginzburg unjustly endured.

Ginzburg brings her education, wit, and relentless optimism to bear as she presents a colorful range of characters and explores deep questions about good, evil, and human nature. I often use this book in my university classrooms because it so effectively illustrates the nature of Stalinism.

Prepare to experience the full range of emotions with this one! (And if you like it, check out the rest of the story in the sequel, Within the Whirlwind.)

Shalamov was a political prisoner in the Soviet Union and was sent to the gulags in northeastern Siberia. This book is life-changing in that he nonchalantly tells stories of extreme discomfort and how the men would kill each other without a second thought if they didn't like what the other was doing. Narrating tales over many years of desperation, Kolyma Tales puts the reader in the shoes of someone who knows they can't escape but can't lose the survival instinct, either. This is easily one of the best books I've ever read.

This book is the symbol of intellectual brilliance and honesty and one which argues that if we are to preserve western civilization, we must restore historical truth as the center of historical inquiry.

I will advertise this magnificent book with a quote: “Looking into the most fearsome abysses of modern times, the historian sees not beasts but faceless bureaucrats, not corpses but statistics, not willful acts of brutality and murder but the banal routine of everyday life, not gas chambers and gulags but military-industrial-geopolitical complexes.” The reader also will learn why. 

The reader also will learn why footnotes disappeared from history books. A book to be enjoyed and savored when in a contemplative mood.

This is a heavy tome, but it is really compelling reading for a history buff like me. Hughes tells the story of the British colonisation of the continent we now know as Australia by focusing on details, details, details—and people! This is not a dry academic book taking the reader through a timeline. Instead, I like its focus on the people at the basis of this brutal period in the history of Australia, associated with huge human costs—both for the convicts forcibly transported half a world away and for the Indigenous population.

Hughes is a storyteller, and he does engage in some speculation, but overall, his facts hold up, and so this book is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in how modern Australia developed over the past 250 years.