28 Books Like Tinker, Tailor, Schoolmum, Spy

There’s nothing better than a little gossip, especially when it’s about grown, mostly rich women, who enjoy knowing everything about everyone else but will do anything to protect their own secrets.

Big Little Lies lets the reader peek into the lives of a group of women and how their beliefs and actions are interwoven. Every action has a reaction, and consequences are very real, yet there is a fierce loyalty that drives the women to protect one another.

It’s not entirely clear who is “good” and who is “bad,” which makes it fun to play along and watch alliances shift or strengthen. You’re also not entirely certain what has happened, which I like because I usually always guess the ending!

Talk about a complicated mother-daughter relationship! Almost as soon as her daughter is born, Blythe suspects something is…off. And no kidding, is it ever? This book takes the idea of not being able to connect with your kid to a whole other, really terrifying level.

What I particularly love about this book is how much it challenges the idea of who is in charge in the mother-daughter relationship, and what it means if your kid is really, truly, bad. This book actually made me gasp. The title refers to the central incident of the book, but I like it because the book also pushes against all kinds of societal norms. 

Mother and daughter relationships are a theme that I love to read – and write! – about and Joanna Glen does this brilliantly in All My Mothers.

From childhood, Eva had a complex relationship with her own mother and is convinced that there is more to her story than she’s been told. Glen uses a children’s picture book as a motif to explore the many kinds of mothers that Eva meets in her life and it affected me quite profoundly.

What kind of mother am I? What kind of mother do children most need? The relationship that made me most emotional was that between Eva and her best friend. Many tears were shed onto my kindle!

I’ve been a huge fan of Marian Keyes for years and I’ve read all her books.

She has a wonderful talent for character development and describing the intricacies of family life and relationships and she seamlessly combines chick-lit humour with meatier, serious themes. In The Break, a story about midlife crisis, Amy’s husband Hugh decides to take a break from their marriage and family, and go travelling to find himself, leaving her at home, a single mum, wondering what the heck has just happened. But will he return, and if he does, will Amy still be the same woman?

I was actually reading this book when I got the idea for my debut novel! 

Read enough Cold War spy novels by John le Carré, and you can’t help but wonder, who is this gorgeous writer and how much of what he writes is grounded in historical fact. Then you read his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, and see that le Carré  (the writer’s pen name) has been trying to sort all that out himself in his books.

Meet David John Moore Cornwell (John le Carré's real name), raised by his father, Ronnie Cornwell, and schooled in the art of espionage by the British Security Service (MI5) and Intelligence Service (MI6). What you get is source material for what you’d glimpsed (and suspected) all along in A Perfect Spy, Little Drummer Girl, Smiley’s People, and many others. Betrayal goes deep.

The troubled relationship between father and son plays out over a lifetime. And as a writer, you wonder, how much of me is embedded… show more.

My line of work has only enhanced my fascination with spies and spying. Espionage was on the periphery of my world and I was privy, on occasion, to snippets of information that shed light on certain events. Reading this book was like being privy to a host of secrets, many during my own era. How fascinating to be taken through the history of espionage from biblical times until today. The author reveals missing pieces to many significant moments in history, where monumental decisions were made based on information bought and sold, died for, killed for, stolen, or extracted by torture or coercion. Equally fascinating is how so much of that information was misinterpreted, denied, ignored, inflated, or simply misplaced. Great battles were won and lost, kingdoms toppled, fortunes spent and made, often based on a single snippet of information.

The main character becomes accidentally involved in international intrigue when he breaks into a house formerly owned by his father, which has become a government establishment. He becomes the target of both the British security services and the Russians, who believe he knows more than he does about the secret work carried on at the establishment. The book deals with his adventures and means of evading both Moscow and MI5.

I like and recommend this book, and others by this author, because of the theme of an ordinary individual being drawn into intention intrigue and finding his life in danger, together with what he does to evade capture both by the enemy and the police. Household also wrote his books with a cynical humour at times which I find absorbing.

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.

My preference is for authors to develop a series for their characters in order for me to fully embrace the depth of the character, if the character is worth developing. I enjoy picking up a novel in which I am familiar with the character as it makes it easier for me to relate to them.

The Spider Shepherd series is essential reading for me, and in particular this book. A book or two previously showed that Shepherd had finally healed enough, from his wife’s death, to find a new relationship. As a non-rule breaker, Shepherd shows that he will do what it takes to protect his family. The ending truly shocked me, leaving me chomping at the bit for the next one.

This is more your standard genre political thriller: written from the perspective of a British Prime Minister and those pulling the political strings.

I really appreciated the insights the author brings, having been an observer of government machinations and an insider of the British Labour Party. I believe it has reflections for anyone interested in understanding the fragility of democracy.

I deliberately didn't read this until after I had written my book to avoid being influenced since there are parallel warnings about how the British Establishment has a stranglehold over real power and only plays lip service to the concept of democracy.