Robert Littell

The Company

The Once and Future Spy

A brand-new novel from New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell, A Plague on Both Your Houses is a thrilling tale of love and war. On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivers a ten-minute televised speech announcing his resignation as Soviet president. Moments later, with little pomp and less circumstance, the red flag is lowered from its floodlit perch atop the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union ceases to exist. Into the vacuum--before a new democracy has time to put down roots--surges the Russian mafia, supplying what the new state cannot: krysha, or "roof"--protection for the privately owned businesses sprouting up across the country. Rivalries turn bloody as Moscow's Jewish mafia battles the Ossete vory v zakone (literally "thieves-in-law") for control of the city. Caught up in the mayhem, Yulia, only daughter of the Jewish mafia godfather, and Roman, only son of the Ossete mafia godfather, navigate the minefield of a star-crossed love affair as they attempt to escape a destiny that appears preordained. A Plague on Both Your Houses is the fictional story of one bloody episode in Moscow's Great Turf War, when clans fought brutally in the streets and the future of the Russian nation was anything but assured.

A Novel in the Shadow of the Russian Mafia

A Plague on Both Your Houses

By national best-selling author, Robert Littell, whose most recent novel The Company received rave reviews across the nation, The Once and Future Spy is finally back in print. This is Littell at the top of his form, constructing a tale of espionage and counterespionage revealing the dirty tricks and dangerous secrets about the subjects he knows intimately the CIA and American history, past and present. Littell proves beyond all doubt that he is a storyteller of inimitable caliber. As Stephen Coonts put it, “Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel. Robert Littell perfected it. The Once and Future Spy is a classic spy story.” At the center of Littell’s plot is an elite plan, so secret and so dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within CIA headquarters. There is virtually no paper trail but, somehow, the plan has sprung a leak. The plotters must urgently trace it or face deadly consequences. Meanwhile, at work elsewhere on another highly sensitive project for "the Company" is an operative known as “the Weeder” a man obsessed with American history and one of its heroes. When the Weeder's and Washington's clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?

A Novel of Obsession

A Novel of Chaos

The Visiting Professor

Somewhere off the coast of Southeast Asia, the U.S.S. Eugene F. Ebersole—a rusted World War II relic whose best days are far past—patrols the waters on a mission to protect American values in this suddenly-not-so-Cold War. The decrepit destroyer's mission is to apprehend or annihilate anything suspicious, but someone on board is preaching peace and the ship’s motley crew is not quite as motivated as its ambitious commander.

Sweet Reason

This harrowing Cold War thriller from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Company is “a brave, ambitious, and most worthy book” (The Washington Post). Connoisseurs of the literary spy thriller rank Robert Littell up there with John le Carré, Graham Greene, and Alan Furst in the first tier of the genre’s pantheon. Set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Prague, The October Circle is one of Littell’s most riveting early works. “Littell is our best exponent of the real Realpolitikal thriller—this one taking place in Sofia in 1968, in a thin, gray ‘present ridiculous’ after the Russians impose their so-called peaceful counterrevolution on Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia . . . Littell has a graphic command of the ‘present ridiculous’ while lending here and there, through assorted characters, an inventive sense of the absurd—but then can we quite demarcate the absurd from the heroic? He’s also a fine ironist, with lines like ‘A Communist is someone who, when he smells roses, looks around for a coffin’ branded on the pages of his intensive, involving novel. Littell writes not only above the genre but beyond it—with smoke rings of conjecture and a striking show of courage.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Exotic setting, constantly surprising . . . and a clockwork plot.” —Newsweek “Exciting . . . This author can tell a story!” —Chicago Daily News

A Novel

The October Circle

New York Times–Bestselling Author: After the USSR’s fall, a Russian academic is let loose in small-town America: “Rich and consistently surprising comedy.” —Publishers Weekly Lemuel Falk, a Russian theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos, has been applying for permission to leave Russia every year for the past twenty-three years. Because he knows state secrets, he hasn’t been allowed to cross the border. Now, suddenly, his request for an exit visa is approved—a sure sign that the situation is even more chaotic than he’d imagined. Falk accepts a chair as a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies in upstate New York. Arriving in the Promised Land under the impression that the streets are paved with Sony Walkmans, he plunges into the heart of another kind of chaos. No sooner has he arrived than he sets off on an academic cat fight, falls in love with a hairdresser half his age, gets mixed up with multiple intelligence agencies, and becomes a self-styled gumshoe tracking a serial killer… “Littell’s fast-paced satire is by turns bawdy, cerebral and touching.” —Publishers Weekly “Quirky characters and linguistic byplay insure the book’s appeal to sophisticated readers.” —Library Journal “One of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today.” —The Washington Post

The Cold War is over, but in the Pentagon there are some who refuse to give up the struggle with the Soviets. Ben Bassett is sent to Moscow by the shadowy organization known as Intelligence Sport Activity and gets to the heart of the Soviet system. The author also wrote The Once and Future Spy.

An Agent in Place

With An Agent in Place, Robert Littell proves once again that he is a master storyteller in the ranks of John le Carré, Len Deighton, and Graham Greene. Deep in the vastness of the Pentagon and the bowels of the massive KGB center in Moscow are old Cold Warriors who refuse to fade away. Yet how can they wage their battles when there are no enemies anymore? Their answer is Ben Bassett. Sent to Moscow as a lowly embassy "housekeeper," Bassett meets a fiercely independent, passionate Russian poet, Aïda Zavaskaya, and falls under her spell. Together they become pawns in a dreadful game that leads to the clandestine heart of the Soviet system itself.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times called it "a perfect little gem, the best Cold War thriller I've read in years," and the praise kept coming with critics hailing Littell as "the American Le Carré" (New York Times) and raving that his books were "as good as thriller writing gets" (The Washington Post). For his fourteenth novel, Robert Littell creates an engrossing, multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic yet utterly candid saga, bringing to life through a host of characters-historical and imagined-the over 40 years of the CIA-"the Company" to insiders. At the heart of the novel is a stunningly conceived mole hunt involving such rivals and allies as the MI6, KGB, and Mossad. Racing across a canvas that spans the legendary Berlin Base in the 1950s-the front line of the simmering Cold War-to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, the Afghan war, the Gorbachev putsch, and other major theatres of operation for the CIA, The Company tells a thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that was amoral, elusive, formidable. Littell tells it like it was: CIA agents, fighting not only the good fight, but sometimes the bad one as well. Littell also brilliantly lays bare the warring within the Company to add another dimension to the spy vs. spy game: the battles between the counterintelligence agents in Washington, like the utterly obsessive real-life mole hunter James Angleton, and the covert action boys in the field, like The Company's Harvey Torriti-the Sorcerer-a brilliant and brash rule breaker and dirty tricks expert who fights fire with fire, and his Apprentice, Jack McAuliffe, recruited fresh out of Yale, who learns tradecraft and the hard truths of life in the field. As this dazzling anatomy of the CIA unfolds, nothing less than the world's future in the second half of the twentieth century is at stake. At once a celebration of a long Cold War well fought, an elegy for the end of an era, and a reckoning for a profession in which moral ambiguity created a wilderness of mirrors, The Company is the Cold War's devastating truth, its entertaining tale, its last word.

Il giovane Philby

The Company. Una historia de la CIA de Robert Littell, veterano periodista experto en temas de espionaje y terrorismo en el periodo de la Guerra Fría, llega por fin a las librerías españolas. En 2007, Ridley Scott, director de films como Blade Runner, Alien, el octavo pasajero o Gladiator, produjo una miniserie de seis capítulos basada en The Company. Con actores como Michael Keaton, Chris O’Donnell o Alfred Molina, la miniserie fue nominada a los Globos de Oro y a los Emmy. La contundente obra escrita por Littell narra en más de mil páginas la historia de la agencia de inteligencia norteamericana más controvertida de la historia del espionaje, desde sus comienzos hasta el final de la Guerra Fría. Acción e ironía se entrelazan para crear una historia trepidante y narrada con solidez. The Company es una obra sorprendente que describe la lucha a vida o muerte de toda una generación de agentes de la CIA durante la larga guerra fría. Robert Littell, inteligente e irónico, cuenta las cosas como sucedieron: los agentes de la CIA no sólo eran los «buenos» que luchaban contra los enemigos extranjeros, sino a veces también eran los malos. Los fines justifican los medios: los asesinatos orquestados, las guerras clandestinas, los secuestros y el derrocamiento de gobiernos legítimos. Todo vale para ganar al enemigo. Sin embargo, detrás de cada maniobra y contramaniobra permanece una pregunta que se extiende desde el principio al final del libro... ¿Quién es el topo dentro de la CIA?

Una historia de la CIA

L'oligarca. Legends

Struggling with disjointed memories about his numerous past identities with the CIA, former field agent turned private detective Martin Odum wonders if he can trust his CIA psychiatrist and struggles to retain a hold on his sanity, a situation that is complicated by a young Russian woman who hires him to find her missing brother-in-law. By the author of The Company.

A Novel of Dissimulation

Legends

A award-winning, psychological post-Cold War novel--adapted as a TNT series starring Sean Bean--Legends is the next blockbuster spy novel from Robert Littell. Martin Odum is a onetime CIA field agent turned private detective in Brooklyn, struggling his way through a labyrinth of memories and past identities--"legends" in Agency parlance. But who is Martin Odum? Is he a creation of the Legend Committee at the CIA's Langley headquarters? Is he suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Widely considered one of the true grand masters of American spy fiction, Robert Littell shifts focus from the broad Cold War canvas of his international bestseller The Company to the life of a single CIA operative caught in a contradictory "wilderness of mirrors" in which remembering the past and forgetting it are both deadly options. From unforgettable opening to astonishing ending, Legends again proves Littell's unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller.

Based on a riveting historical episode, The Stalin Epigram is a fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century -- and one of the few artists in Soviet Russia who daringly refused to pay creative homage to Joseph Stalin. The poet's defiance of the Kremlin dictator and the Bolshevik regime -- particularly his outspoken criticism of Stalin's collectivization rampage that drove millions of Russian peasants to starvation -- reached its climax in 1934 when Mandelstam, putting his life on the line, composed a searing indictment of Stalin in a sixteen-line epigram and secretly recited it to a handful of friends and fellow artists. Would Stalin and his merciless state security apparatus get wind of this brazenly insulting poem? Would the poet's body and spirit be crushed under the weight of the state if they did? Narrated in turn by Mandelstam himself, his devoted wife, his great friends the poets Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, along with vivid fictional characters, The Stalin Epigram is the page-turning tale of courage and the human spirit told in deftly poetic prose by a perceptive, talented writer. With the benefit of extraordinary research and an almost mystical empathy, bestselling author Robert Littell has drawn a fictional portrait of the beleaguered poet struggling to survive the running riot of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. This memorable novel culminates in a wholly unexpected encounter that illuminates the agonizing choices Russian intellectuals faced during the Stalinist terror and explains what drew Robert Littell to the poignant subject in the first place.

The Stalin Epigram

Da Kim Philby flygtede til Moskva i 1963, blev han den mest omtalte og berygtede dobbeltagent i spionagens historie. Ved begyndelsen af Anden Verdenskrig var han blevet hvervet til den engelske efterretningstjeneste. Han steg hurtigt i graderne og blev efter krigen udstationeret i Washington som ledende forbindelsesofficer mellem det engelske Secret Service og CIA. Ved afsløringen af andre medlemmer af gruppen af dobbeltagenter kendt som 'Cambridge Five' kom det for dagens lys, at Philby var begyndt at spionere for Sovjetunionen, mange år før han gik ind i den engelske efterretningstjeneste. Det endte med, at han flygtede til Moskva for næsen af de engelske agenter, der var på vej til at arrestere ham, og han tilbragte de sidste femogtyve år af sit liv i Rusland. I 'Unge Philby' fortæller Robert Littell den ikke særlig kendte historie om spionens unge år. Gennem beretninger fra Philbys venner, kærester og hans sovjetiske og engelske føringsofficerer følger vi et dybt fascinerende menneske, som konstant fik sine overordnede på begge sider af jerntæppet til at spekulere på, hvor hans loyalitet egentlig lå. For hvert lag af dobbelthed, der afdækkes, rejser der sig nye spørgsmål: Hvad var det, der drev denne berygtede dobbeltagent? Hvem var, når det kom til stykket, den egentlige Kim Philby?

Unge Philby

The defection of a Soviet courier upends the life of the head of a secret U.S. government agency in this Cold War-era spy thriller. With the publication of his New York Times bestseller The Company, Robert Littell reestablished his position as one of the top writers of intelligent, ironic, and always entertaining espionage thrillers. After many years The Debriefing is finally available again as Overlook brings back Littell’s classics . . . From the secret meeting rooms of Washington to the interrogation chambers of the KGB, The Debriefing is a novel of exquisite suspense and dazzlingly tense drama. Stone is the Head of an elite arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and a master of the sophisticated art of debriefing. When Oleg Kulakov defects from Russia, handcuffed to a sealed diplomatic pouch, it’s Stone’s job to find out if he’s genuine. He uncovers Kulakov’s every secret, probes the darkest reaches of Kulakov’s heart, and penetrates Russia itself to learn the chilling truth—a truth that tears his own world apart. “Elegant . . . works like a clock with three sticks of dynamite attached to it.” —The New York Times “The Debriefing is beautifully plotted . . .with a clever, ironic twist at the end. . . . Littell’s craftsmanship shines through.” —Chicago Tribune

Robert Littell

Books

Your next favorite book is out there