Books like The Poet's Game — picked by fans

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.

Gerald Seymour’s A Duty of Care proves why he remains one of the masters of modern espionage fiction.

Exiled MI5 officer Jonas Merrick uncovers a plot linking an MI6 agent in a Russian gulag and an Albanian gang laundering money for the Kremlin elite (see the connection there?). The result is a story that blends furious pacing with soul-stirring moral complexity. Seymour captures the shadowy intersections of loyalty, corruption, and survival, making every character feel painfully human. 

This is how I approach storytelling as a creative writer: by weaving crossroads of competing motives and belief systems that collide in beautiful chaos. This thriller does just that. It is both a pulse-pounding chase and a meditation on the cost of duty, cementing its place as one of the year’s standout spy novels.

Lawler, as a former CIA case officer, brings tremendous authenticity and verve to his spy novels, and The Traitor’s Tale is no different. 

I loved the fast-moving, vibrant plot, and I appreciated the characters, both the protagonists (especially Ambrose, Shawnee Chasing Hawk, and Gary Trichter). I enjoyed the intricate plot of espionage, recruitment, betrayal, a love story, and its finale. 

Lawler’s book appealed to me because it reveals the very human side of espionage, which, in the end, is about relationships between human beings—between intelligence officers and their agents/spies.

I have always enjoyed McCloskey’s spy novels, especially those set in the Middle East.

His newest, a tale of espionage and betrayal set in Iran, appealed to me because of its characters—an Iranian dentist recruited by Mossad as an agent, his Mossad spy handler, and their Iranian adversaries. I loved the realism and grittiness of this tale, and its portrayal of the human costs of espionage, and its betrayals, fault lines, and tragedies.

I love how McCloskey, a former CIA analyst, humanizes his characters, both the Israelis and the Iranians, showing us their human frailties, loyalties, and passions.

I loved Yariv Inbar’s tale, one of the best that I have read in years.

As a Mossad officer and novelist, he brilliantly captures the intricacies and nuances of espionage in a tale involving Irit, a Mossad officer, and her protagonist Noor, the wife of a Syrian WMD expert whom Irit hopes to recruit. I enjoyed how Inbar captured the intimacy of espionage, and the different stages of its life cycle, and how such things often end tragically, with multiple sorrows and traumas.

My other favorite character was Menachem, a former Mossad officer turned psychotherapist, who advises Mossad and Irit along the way, bringing an additional human touch to this singular novel.

I loved this book by Shaun Walker.

While not a novel, this tale reads like one and is a marvelous account of the training, development, and deployment of the USSR’s and Russia’s greatest illegals, many of whom could easily inhabit the finest spy novels ever written. Walker writes about the early inter-war illegals, as well as the later World War II and Cold War illegals, and their colorful lives and personalities, as well as those of their ruthless masters.

I appreciated Walker’s ability to explore the psychological and hidden costs of such work, and the toll which it takes upon the illegal officers and their families. Like me, lovers of the series The Americans will enjoy this fine book and appreciate the late Yuri Shevchenko’s comment (he was a legendary Russian illegal, for many years overseas): “All of us on this earth get just one life. But not illegals. They… show more.

Hoffman tells the previously little-known story of Soviet military engineer Adolf Tolkachev, whose disgust with the communist regime inspired him to turn over enormously valuable secrets to the CIA station in Moscow beginning in the late 1970s. Hoffman’s careful reporting allows him to describe in meticulous and fascinating detail the remarkable techniques and great risks involved in running an agent in Moscow late in the Cold 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.