17 Books Like The Untouchable by Gerald Seymour

This is a beast of a thriller at 700 pages, but I thoroughly enjoyed the deep dive nevertheless. American ex-spy Pilgrim is pitched against a Saudi mujahideen fighter known as the Saracen, who is bent on avenging himself against the United States with a chillingly devastating plan.

Both protagonist and antagonist are well fleshed out with detailed backstories that make the character development top-notch in this murder mystery-turned-spy terrorism thriller. There's an interesting switch between first and third person, which I've rarely encountered.

I found it quite engrossing, and many scenes linger long after I put the book down. It's a solid thriller that I could really get my teeth into.

A thriller that draws on modern issues and weaves them into a complex and thought-provoking plot. Just what I love. The intriguing characters include the main character, Gregori, a mayor who was once a concert violinist. I'm drawn to stories about 'ordinary' people especially when they are involved in high-stakes mystery and intrigue. Setting it in Siberia adds a great sense of place. The harsh and cold conditions had me shivering as I read. I skipped some of the more gruesome descriptions, but I had to keep reading to the end.

I knew exactly nothing about the Spanish Civil War before reading this. It's an odd book - a memoir of a period of time in his life where he didn't exactly do much - stood in a trench for a few months, didn't shoot anyone in Barcelona, then got shot in the throat. Still, the explanations of the war and the politics of it all were surprisingly interesting, even if I don't think it was the clearest. Orwell does an exceptional job of describing the reality of the war and how it changed him, and I think that's the most interesting takeaway - war was (and is) tragic, unfair, disgusting, lousy, muddy, exhausting, and yet, both pointless and inevitable. And at the centre of it all, are humans.

In the closing remarks of the book, Orwell is travelling back to England.
"Down here it was still the England I had… show more.

I read this book first on a long flight, and I had bought it at my departure airport. It was chosen because of my belief that Mandela thus far remains the quintessential leader that most of Africa still lacks!

An autobiography captures the nuanced structural trajectories and diverse challenges of the African state. A story of struggle, but it demonstrates the value of resilience and the need for painstaking commitment to the ideals of national development, despite the pain it may cause to the leader. A must-read for leaders and aspiring leaders in Africa, since despite focusing on the peculiar context of South Africa and the struggles of Mandela, it also embodies fine examples for principled leadership and statecraft that are still very much relevant now.

I chose this book as it explores the difficult, murky world of the double agent, that of Colonel Oleg Gordievsky of the KGB. I could have chosen any one of half a dozen of Ben’s books for great nonfiction writing. However, this story is set in a wonderful period for the espionage lover: the Cold War of the 1980s. A rollicking yarn that I think is one the best escape from Russia stories there is. I have to say this book constantly amazed me.

Indeed, I owe a debt to Ben, as his writing inspired me to write my own nonfiction espionage books, of which I have written four to date.

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!

Ever since I heard the words how a long knife had ‘skewered’ Scudder to the floor, I was hooked on Buchan’s classic story and became a devote of Richard Hannay. When I say I heard it, it is because a teacher read it to us at school when they used to do things like that. The chase around the Highlands of Scotland remains one of the greatest pieces of spy writing. You can feel the ingenuity and sheer effort Hannay has to put into his quest to avoid capture and find the 39 Steps.

I have read the book many times since, and it has stood the test of time with flying colors. In many respects, it should be the starting point for the aspiring espionage writer.

A master thriller writer, his characters are invariably fascinating – the ‘good’ ones complex with frailties yet often quietly heroic, the ‘bad’ ones, not just villains but people. His plots take you on a page-turning journey in credible geo-contemporary theatres, combining gripping tensions and insights. I first met him in 1969-70 when he was a television reporter covering the anti-apartheid struggle in Britain.

Another journalist whom I have met in real life the award-winning British journalist and broadcaster who writes for The Guardian, Sam Bourne is the literary pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland. To Kill A Man is a classic thriller with a climactic twist, a gripping tour de force through American feminism up against violent misogyny, ambition and struggle, politics, and crime. He writes with both simplicity and complexity, insight, and pacy readability.   

I enjoyed commenting on early drafts of this dramatic Georgian historical fiction written by my wife Elizabeth about her great-great-great-grandmother: painstakingly researched and vividly portrayed, it’s about love, betrayal, and survival. Lucy, strong-willed daughter of English landed gentry, born in the late 18th century, married Sam Lord, a plantation owner and fortune hunter from Barbados, at a time when women were their husband’s chattels with no rights even over the children. Abused and imprisoned by him in Barbados, she escaped with the help of enslaved people after giving birth at sea, braving disease and cruelty, and witnessing the abject misery of slavery in her descent from a life of pampered luxury to a struggle for survival in a far-off land.