Here are 100 books that Savage Son fans have personally recommended if you like
Savage Son.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
As a lifelong journalist, I’ve covered and have been drawn to tales of intrigue, con men, massive financial scams, domestic terrorists and international plots, and the investigators and authorities who pursue them.
Robert Dugoni has created the nearly perfect American spy in Charles Jenkins, an unassuming father, husband, and gentleman farmer who wants nothing more than to be left alone after a brilliant career ends in shambles.
But above all else Jenkins is a patriot who reenters Russia, his old stomping grounds, to rescue his most-prized confidential informant and spirit her out of the country before she's captured and murdered by Putin’s thugs. Dugoni and his characters breathe new life into the spy genre.
An Amazon Charts, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal bestselling series.
An American operative in Russia is on the run for his life in a thriller of heart-stopping betrayal and international intrigue by the New York Times bestselling author of The Eighth Sister.
Betrayed by his own country and tried for treason, former spy Charles Jenkins survived an undercover Russian operation gone wrong. Exonerated, bitter, and safe, the retired family man is through with duplicitous spy games. Then he learns of a woman isolated in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo Prison.
If it's Paulina Ponomayova, the agent who sacrificed her life to…
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…
Balakrishna Kamath has to his credit a 39-year-long service in one of India’s premier Intelligence agencies. His long service has taken him to many places and enabled him to gain considerable experience in handling challenging operations. The coveted national-level honors - The Indian Police Medal and President's Police Medal, he had received during his service, would indicate the distinction he has earned in his career. After his retirement, he has written two novels – The Velvet Gloves (November 2018) and The Ace of Shadows (March 2022). These novels dwelling on intelligence operations have been recently signed for adaptation into web series.
The book is a remarkable one amongst contemporary spy thrillers. In spy thrillers, all agents have difficult missions to accomplish. However, in The Eleventh Commandment, in addition to the extremely challenging assignment in a high-security environment, the protagonist has another dangerous enemy to tackle, and strangely, that is his own boss! Then there is this unique crisis in the protagonist’s personal and family life. Only Archer’s master storytelling abilities could have woven these complex dimensions together to present an excellent and memorable thriller.
A gripping spy thriller set at an addictive pace, from bestselling author, Jeffrey Archer.
Connor Fitzgerald is the professional's professional. Holder of the Medal of Honour. Devoted family man. The CIA's most deadly weapon. But for twenty-eight years, he has been leading a double life. And only days from his retirement, he comes across an enemy even he cannot handle. The enemy is his own boss. And she has only one purpose: to destroy him. Meanwhile, the United States is faced with an equally formidable foe: a new Russian President, determined to force a military confrontation between the two superpowers.…
I have chosen the five books below as the most original and thought-provoking ones on Russian history and culture, books that I return to again and again when thinking about the questions they raise. They are not books that I always agree with, but to me that makes them all the more valuable!
Hidden in Plain View makes us see Tolstoy in a completely new light. I find Morson one of the most engaging critics of the Russian classics, and this is perhaps his best and most curmudgeonly argumentative book.
It offers a brilliant reading of War and Peace as an “anti-novel”—as an attack on the form and philosophical suppositions of the “novel” (the word in Russian can also refer to a literary or real-life “romance”).
It follows in the footsteps of the Russian critic-philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who viewed the novel as a dialogical, open-ended “anti-genre,” without a fixed form, that cannibalizes all other genres. In War and Peace, this also serves to explain Tolstoy’s attack on history-writing, which shares the false, “closed” narrative presumptions as novel romances.
For decades, the formal peculiarities of War and Peace disturbed Russian and Western critics, who attributed both the anomalous structure and the literary power of the book to Tolstoy's "primitive," unruly genius. Using that critical history as a starting point, this volume recaptures the overwhelming sense of strangeness felt by the work's first readers and thereby illuminates Tolstoy's theoretical and narratological concerns.
The author demonstrates that the formal peculiarities of War and Peace were deliberate, designed to elude what Tolstoy regarded as the falsifying constraints of all narratives, both novelistic and historical. Developing and challenging the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin,…
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…
My professional and personal interests in the Russian Empire began with a trip to St. Petersburg and Moscow I took as a college student in January 1992. The Soviet Union had officially collapsed the previous month: I was able to meet with ordinary citizens, hear their stories, and experience what the end of an empire looked like on the ground. I started to learn the Russian language–including one summer spent in Kazan, on the Volga River–and earned my doctorate in modern Russian History. My job as a history professor has allowed me to travel to Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all helping me to understand the lingering effects of Russia’s imperial projects.
If you want to understand why so many Russians today (including President Vladimir Putin) believe that their national identity has roots in Kyiv, Faith Hillis’s book is a must-read. As I wrote in a review for The Moscow Times, Russian colonial settlers in and around the Ukrainian city increasingly began to push a narrative that they were all “children of Rus’,” a reference to the political entity that existed in the region from the 9th to the 13th centuries.
From the 1830s until the outbreak of World War I, as Hillis writes, this group shaped imperial policies about the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians even while they urged the imperial government to “protect” them from the Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians living all around. When Putin justified the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as one where Russia needed to “return” the “lands of ancient Rus’” and to “protect” Russian-speakers in Ukraine,…
In Children of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River-which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine-was one of the Russian empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest's…
I have chosen the five books below as the most original and thought-provoking ones on Russian history and culture, books that I return to again and again when thinking about the questions they raise. They are not books that I always agree with, but to me that makes them all the more valuable!
Of the very many books I have read about Dostoevsky, this is one of the best, and I return to the author’s ideas again and again. Holquist argues that “Dostoevsky is the inheritor of a particular historical tradition—a tradition of radical doubt about history itself.”
His readings of Dostoevsky’s individual works show how Dostoevsky responded to this challenge, and are brilliant, theoretically sophisticated yet clear and convincingly argued.
What place do Dostoevsky's works occupy in the history of the novel? To answer this question, Michael Holquist focuses on the formal aspects of Dostoevskian narrative.
The author argues that the novel is a genre that constantly seeks its own identity: we still do not know what it is, since the uniqueness of its members defines the class to which it belongs. This anomaly explains the central role of the novel for Russians, perplexed as they were in the nineteenth century by idiosyncrasies that hindered development of a coherent national identity.
Michael Holquist shows that the generic impulse of the…
I am teacher of Russian History in the University of York and have been in both countries many times. Russia’s war against Ukraine is something that has touched me personally and professionally in the most profound way: witnessing Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has been heartbreaking. Understanding why that war happened and what its consequences will be is of vital importance for anyone interested in the modern world, in justice, and the future of Europe. These books offer clear, passionate, and compelling accounts of the war, explaining the historical background, the immediate causes, the principle actors, and the Russian way of waging of the war.
Luke Harding is a journalist who has spent many years as The Guardian correspondent in Ukraine including the present war.
The book is a mixture of historical analysis and on-the-spot reporting which makes it read like a thriller. It is vivid and at times harrowing, particularly the reports from Bucha after the massacres there. Harding pulls no punches, arguing the brutality of the war comes from Putin himself: ‘His apparent goal: the annihilation of a country, a culture and its citizens.’
Complicit in this genocidal operation are the Russian media elite who frequently openly call for the extermination of the Ukrainian nation. An excellent account from an impeccable source.
A FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING
The first book of reportage from the front line of the Ukraine war. This is a powerful, moving first draft of history written by the award-winning Guardian journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Collusion and Shadow State.
'An excellent, moving account of an ongoing tragedy.' ANNE APPLEBAUM
'Compelling, important and heartbreaking.' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
'Essential reading.' ELIOT HIGGINS, founder of Bellingcat
'Brilliant.' ANDREY KURKOV
For months, the omens had pointed in one scarcely believable direction: Russia was about to invade Ukraine. And yet, the world was stunned by…
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 have chosen the five books below as the most original and thought-provoking ones on Russian history and culture, books that I return to again and again when thinking about the questions they raise. They are not books that I always agree with, but to me that makes them all the more valuable!
This is, in my opinion, the best short history of Russia (only about 100 pages). It’s full of unexpected ideas, provocative and challenging.
It was published in 2003 and is written from the perspective of a Russia in decline (Russia of the 1990s, before Putin), but nevertheless offers a brilliant analysis of why the country has tended toward isolationism and xenophobia. It is thus almost predictive of Putin’s recent break with the West. I have assigned it to classes and recommend it to friends.
Is Russian history one big inevitable failure? The Soviet Union's demise and Russia's ensuing troubles have led many to wonder. But this is to look through a skewed prism indeed. In this provocative and elegantly written short history of Russia, Marshall Poe takes us well beyond the Soviet haze deep into the nation's fascinating--not at all inevitable, and in key respects remarkably successful--past. Tracing Russia's course from its beginnings to the present day, Poe shows that Russia was the only non-Western power to defend itself against Western imperialism for centuries. It did so by building a powerful state that molded…
You can experience Russia by exploring the churches and palaces of St Petersburg and Moscow. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not my approach. For me, it has always made more sense to look at the largest country on earth from its edges, the distant mountains, steppes, forests, and waters that surround it. For three decades, I have travelled across this space, studied its languages, written books and articles about it. And I have tried to look through the lens of the diverse peoples and cultures that have been part of Russian history, for better or worse. The rise and fall of the Russian Empire are unthinkable without them.
This book was a milestone in the study of tsarist Russia as a multiethnic and multireligious empire, especially its large Muslim population.
By the 2000s, we had become used to thinking that the Russian Empire had suppressed or ignored its religious minorities who, in turn, had avoided state institutions as much as possible. Crews’ book shattered that idea.
Exploring court cases and other disputes across time and space, he boldly argued that Muslims turned to the state as protector of their faith and that Islam became a pillar of Russian imperial policy. Many scholars have attacked his argument since then, partly for good reasons.
And yet, his contribution has proven to be more important and long-lived than those of most of his critics. On top, it’s a wonderful read.
Russia occupies a unique position in the Muslim world. Unlike any other non-Islamic state, it has ruled Muslim populations for over 500 years. Though Russia today is plagued by its unrelenting war in Chechnya, Russia's approach toward Islam once yielded stability. In stark contrast to the popular 'clash of civilisations' theory that sees Islam inevitably in conflict with the West, Robert D. Crews reveals the remarkable ways in which Russia constructed an empire with broad Muslim support. In the 18th Century, Catherine the Great inaugurated a policy of religious toleration that made Islam an essential pillar of Orthodox Russia. For…
I write about Eastern Europe, both past and present, and what it means to have Russia as a neighbor. I write historical fiction and historical thrillers with a soupcon of espionage. I talk about the politics of the day, whether the story is set during WWII or in modern times. While my stories and characters are fictional, I constantly strive to accurately reflect time, place, and, most of all, history. I hope that my novels entertain and inform about a corner of the world folks may not know much about.
Mr. Galeotti makes Russia’s ever-changing military status read like a spy novel. You might think information about drones, tanks, aircraft, and MANPADS is boring. I beg to differ.
Starting with the disarray caused by the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Galeotti tells us who changed things, who failed to, and why. He matches the retooling of the Russian military to war lessons learned in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and Syria.
Mr. Galeotti has intimate knowledge of history, personal connections with individuals in the Russian military, and a brilliant way of putting it all together. He asked a Russian soldier his opinion of a photograph of Putin, who never served in the military, sitting at the controls of a fighter aircraft. The soldier said it was like being married to a virgin; the concept was good, but the experience wasn’t there.
The Financial Times - Best books of 2022: Politics
'The prolific military chronicler and analyst Mark Galeotti has produced exactly the right book at the right time.' The Times
A new history of how Putin and his conflicts have inexorably reshaped Russia, including his devastating invasion of Ukraine.
Putin's Wars is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
After spending many years as a historian, I could be really negative about humanity. We have done many bad things to each other and the planet, but I don’t think there is a downward trajectory. I don’t believe in fate. My last published works have been about using fear and conspiracy to gain certain ends, but 99% of those were imagined connections, not some sophisticated plans of evil geniuses. The imagined conspiracy came after the actions. So, the books I have listed that I think are excellent are ways out of terrible situations, some of our own making, but often not. I hope you enjoy the books.
This is a lovely book about a Siberian Tiger that stocked and killed hunters who had been hunting tigers. Vaillant situates this fascinating story into the collapse of the Soviet Union. People on the far eastern edge of Russian Siberia, the Amur River area, were desperate to survive as the economy collapsed.
At the same time, China is taking off, and the affluent will buy tiger parts at great cost to increase their sexual stamina. Thus, desperate Russian hunters arrive. Vaillant does a great job following a game warden as he tries to solve the crime of a tiger seemingly bent on revenge.
I think he shows that good people are still out there trying to do right, no matter the cost.
'An unbelievable tale, expertly told' Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain
'A superb book ' Daily Mail * 'Masterful . . . mesmerising, rangy and relentless' Sunday Telegraph
A man-eating tiger is hunting villagers in the snowy forests of Far Eastern Russia.
A small team of men and their dogs must hunt the tiger in turn. As evidence mounts, it becomes clear that the tiger's attacks aren't random: it is seeking revenge. Injured, starving and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.
As he tracks the tiger's deadly progress, John Vaillant draws an unforgettable…
