Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Eric Ambler

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Josef Vadassy, a Hungarian refugee and language teacher living in France, is enjoying his first break for years in a small hotel on the Riviera. But when he takes his holiday photographs to be developed at a local chemists, he suddenly finds himself mistaken for a Gestapo agent and a charge of espionage is levelled at him. To prove himself innocent to the French police, he must discover which one of his fellow guests at his pension is the real spy. As he desperately tries to uncover the true culprit's identity, Vadassy must risk his job, his safety and everything he holds dear.

Epitaph for a Spy

John le Carré

Harry Pendel is the charismatic proprietor of Pendel and Braithwaite Limitada of Panama, through whose doors everyone who is anyone in Central America passes; Andrew Osnard, mysterious and fleshly, is a spy. His secret mission is two-pronged: to keep a watchful eye on the political manoeuvrings leading up to the American handover of the Panama Canal on 31st December 1999; and to secure for himself the immense private fortune that has until now churlishly eluded him.

The Tailor of Panama

Michael Gilbert

Behrens and Calder are two secret agents living in the English countryside, desperately seeking a quiet life. But despite their best efforts, they find themselves repeatedly obliged to wipe out a host of brutal and ingenious traitors, Soviet spies and old Nazis.

Game Without Rules

Girija Krishnan, an Indian clerk, sees the opportunity of his lifetime when he stumbles on a lost cache of arms hidden in the Malayan jungle. If he can find a buyer for the weapons, he will be able to achieve his life-long dream of creating his own bus company. But the risks are as high as the rewards, as the arms draw ever more people into their dangerous orbit: an entrepreneurial trio of Chinese brothers, a sleazy British former soldier, and a naive American couple who find themselves horribly out of their depth. 
 
Following the arms as they travel from the jungle to Singapore to Indonesia, Ambler's classic thriller is a tour de force of psychological and political insight, and winner of the 1959 Gold Dagger award.

Passage of Arms

Len Deighton

Embattled agent Bernard Samson is used to being passed over for promotion as his younger, more ambitious colleagues - including his own wife Fiona - rise up the ranks of MI6. When a valued agent in East Berlin warns the British of a mole at the heart of the Service, Samson must return to the field and the city he loves to uncover the traitor's identity. This is the first novel in Len Deighton's acclaimed Game, Set and Match trilogy.

Berlin Game

Penguin Modern Classics

The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, a British soldier's son born in 1947 in a newly independent Pakistan, and Sasha, the refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. 
 
The two men meet first as students in riot-torn West Berlin of the late Sixties and again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage. When they meet once more, in today's unipolar world of terror, counter-terror and the war of lies, they become involved in clandestine activities - with lethal results. 
 
Absolute Friends is a superbly paced novel spanning fifty-six years, a theatrical masterstroke of tragi-comic writing, and a savage fable of our times.

Absolute Friends

Ian Fleming

James Bond, the secret service’s most lethal agent, is a marked man 
Deep inside the Soviet Union, a plot is taking shape. Under the fiendish Colonel Rosa Klebb, the Russian counter-intelligence organisation SMERSH are laying a trap that will not only eliminate Bond, but strike at the very heart of the British establishment. The bait is the irresistible ‘defector’ Tatiana Romanova and a precious coding machine. The weapon is the psychotic assassin, Grant. As 007 is lured to Istanbul, a deadly game begins.

From Russia With Love

A corporate lawyer from the House of Single &amp; Single is shot dead in cold blood on a Turkish hillside. A children's entertainer in Devon is hauled to his local bank late at night to explain a monumental influx of cash. A Russian freighter is arrested in the Black Sea. A celebrated London financier has disappeared into thin air. A British customs officer is on a trail of corruption and murder. The logical connection of these events is one of the many pleasures of this extraordinary new novel of love, deceit and the triumph of humanity. Single and Single is a thrilling journey of the human heart - intimate, magical and riotous, revealing le Carré at the height of his dramatic and creative powers.

Single & Single

Bernard Samson is a spy on the run. But in the murky streets of Berlin, he knows where to hide. Wanted for an act of treachery he has not committed, he must not only escape the grasp of London Central, but get to the bottom of a tangled conspiracy that is about to change everything. In the thrilling penultimate instalment of the Hook, Line and Sinker trilogy, Bernard's personal and professional life collide with devastating consequences. 
 
A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL

Spy Line

Bernard Samson returns to Berlin in the final novel in the classic spy trilogy, FAITH, HOPE and CHARITY. 
 
Bernard continues to chip away at the mystery of his sister-in-law Tessa Kosinski's death in Berlin on the crucial night when his wife Fiona was brought out of the East. Fighting to uncover the truth, he must also confront the key relationships in his own life: Fiona is still far from stable now that she has returned to work, and their children remain in the clutches of his wealthy and manipulative father-in-law. Meanwhile, Werner Volkmann, Bernard's friend since childhood, is reluctant to get involved in Bernard's crusade. 
 
A wonderful depiction both of covert operations and office politics, Charity is packed with action, incident and intrigue, bringing to a triumphant conclusion a series of ten novels that represents one of the great achievements of modern English fiction.

Charity

A Soviet space scientist defects to win academic freedom, but western intelligence has other plans for him, and sends an unnamed spy - perhaps the same reluctant hero of The IPCRESS File - to look after him. But what follows is a blood-streaked trail across three continents... 
 
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy reveals a more mature Deighton exploring relationships between couples: professional rivals and private allies, spy and counter-spy, master and slave. Some are drawn together mutual comfort, others for exploitation. With an uncanny feeling for landscape, he begins his story in the awesome emptiness and remorseless heat of the Sahara desert. From there a trail of blood leads to Manhattan, Paris, Dublin and halfway back across Africa. 
 
In a narrative as compelling as it is tantalizing, Deighton surpasses all his previous triumphs and holds the reader spellbound to the very last page.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

Kenton's career as a journalist depends on his facility with languages, his knowledge of European politics and his quick judgement. Where his judgement sometimes fails him, however, is in his personal life. When he travels to Nuremberg to investigate a story about a top-level meeting of Nazi officials, he inadvertently finds himself on a train bound for Austria after a bad night of gambling. Stranded with no money, Kenton jumps at the chance to earn a fee helping a refugee smuggle securities across the border. Yet he soon discovers that the documents he holds have far more than cash value - and that they could cost him his life ...

Uncommon Danger

Bernard Samson returns to Berlin in the second novel in the classic spy trilogy, FAITH, HOPE and CHARITY. 
 
Bernard is trying hard to readjust his life in the face of questions about his wife Fiona, and her defection to the East. Is she the brilliant high-flyer that her Department seems to think she is? Or is she a spent force, a wife and mother unwilling or unable to face her domestic responsibilities? Bernard doesn't know but is determined to find out. 
 
Bernard's boos Dicky Cruyer is certainly not anxious to reveal what he knows, as he jostles for power with Fiona herself in London Central, and takes to the road with Bernard on a mysterious mission to Poland.

Hope

'Deighton is a marvel ... a tale told by an author at the height of his power' Chicago Tribune 
 
World-weary agent Bernard Samson is losing control of his personal and professional life. Sent to Mexico to aid the defection of a KGB agent to the West, he has a chance to prove his worth. Instead he is torn between conflicting loyalties, and lost in a maze of double-dealing and duplicity. The second novel in the Game, Set and Match trilogy is a gripping portrayal of a man who can trust no one, not even those closest to him. 
 
A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL

Mexico Set

An English couple, Perry and Gail, are taking an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula and a diamond-encrusted gold watch. He also has a tattoo on his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis. 
 
What else he wants propels the young lovers on a tortuous journey through Paris to a safe house in the Swiss Alps, to the murkiest cloisters of the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's Intelligence Establishment.

Our Kind of Traitor

Robert Littell

Charlie Heller is a CIA cryptographer, a quiet man in a back-room job. He’s not a spy, let alone an assassin. But when his beloved fiancée is murdered by terrorists and his employers refuse to pursue her killers, Heller decides to take matters into his own hands. Pursuing the culprits all the way behind the Iron Curtain, he is playing a dangerous game and doesn’t know the rules. But even an amateur can outwit his enemies – especially when he’s got nothing to lose.

The Amateur

Stella Rode has twice disturbed the ancient cloisters of Carne School: firstly by being the wrong sort, with her doyleys and china ducks, and secondly by being murdered.  George Smiley, who has his own connection with the school, is asked by an old Service friend to investigate. As Smiley probes further beneath Carne's respectable veneer, he uncovers far more than a simple crime of passion. In his second George Smiley novel, le Carré moves outside the world of espionage to reveal the secrets at the heart of another particularly English institution. The result is a pitch-perfect murder mystery, with Smiley as master detective.

A Murder of Quality

Of all the mysteries Bernard Samson has encountered, the greatest is his wife Fiona. Dedicated agent of the Service and a woman of secrets, she will risk everything to play the long game. As the truth about the decision that shattered their marriage is gradually revealed, the web of deception that has snared Bernard for ten years begins to unravel. In the gripping, tragic finale of the Hook, Line and Sinker trilogy, everything we thought we knew is brought into question. 
 
A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL

Spy Sinker

Millions of pounds have gone missing, and the Department have sent agent Bernard Samson to Washington to track them down. But this mission is just the start of something far deeper and darker. It will take him from the English suburbs to Berlin, the South of France to Los Angeles and the heart of a maelstrom. In the first part of the Hook, Line and Sinker trilogy, friends become enemies, pursuer becomes victim and no one - not even Bernard himself - is above suspicion. 
A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL

Spy Hook

Computer games run in a classified war studies centre in London. Nuclear submarines prowl beneath Arctic ice. And war games go into real time. Patrick Armstrong - possibly the same reluctant hero of The IPCRESS File - is sent to investigate. 
 
Patrick Armstrong is a tough, dedicated agent and war-games player. But in Armstrong's violent, complex world, war-games are all too often played for real. Soon the chase (or is it escape?) is on. 
 
From the secretive computerized college of war studies in London via a bleak, sinister Scottish redoubt to the Arctic ice cap where nuclear submarines prowl ominously beneath frozen wastes, a lethal web of violence and double-cross is woven. And Europe's whole future hangs by a deadly thread... 
 
Spy Story is the most authentic and brilliant novel of espionage yet from the world's greatest writer of spy thrillers.

Spy Story

The murdered man had been an agent - once, long ago. But George Smiley's superiors at the Secret Service want to see the crime buried, not solved. Smiley will not leave it at that, not when it might lead him all the way to Karla, the elusive Soviet spymaster . . . 
 
Smiley's People is a thrilling confrontation between one of the most famous spies in all fiction and his Cold War rival, Karla. Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, it is as tense and unforgettable as only le Carré's novels can be.

Smiley's People

Bernard Samson returns to Berlin in the first novel in the classic spy trilogy, FAITH, HOPE and CHARITY. 
 
Bernard has known that he is not getting the full picture from London Central ever since discovering that his wife Fiona was a double agent. 
 
Werner Volkmann has been cast out by London Central as untrustworthy. Yet Werner still seems able to pick up information that Bernard should have been told...

Faith

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War. Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilt in the name of the greater good. 
 
Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own story, John le Carré has given us a novel of superb and enduring quality.

A Legacy of Spies

Joseph Conrad

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'Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world' 
 
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions.

The Secret Agent

Deep in Marxist Guerilla territory a hopeless war is being fought. 
 
The Berlin Wall is demolished. Marx is dead. Try telling that to Ramon and his desperate men hiding in the jungle cradling their AK 47s, dusting off the slabs of Semtex and dreaming of world revolution. 
 
MAMista takes us to the dusty, violent capital of Spanish Guiana in South America, and thence into the depths of the rain forest. There, four people become caught up in a struggle both political and personal, a struggle corrupted by ironies and deceits, and riddled with the accidents of war. They are four people who never should have found themselves bound together in a mission for revolution, which may be the sentence of death. 
 
Never has Deighton portrayed so accurately the terror and the tedium of war, or the shifting alliances and betrayals between people who have nothing to lose but their lives.

MAMista

At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities - about an international businessman at the hotel with suspicious dealings - backfires terribly, and people close to Pine begin to die, he commits himself to a battle against powerful forces he cannot begin to imagine. 
 
In a chilling tale of corrupt intelligence agencies, billion-dollar price tags and the truth of the brutal arms trade, John le Carré creates a claustrophobic world in which no one can be trusted.

The Night Manager

Tessa Quayle has been horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has disappeared. 
 
Her husband, Justin, a career diplomat and amateur gardener at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. His quest takes him to the Foreign Office in London, across Europe and Canada and back to Africa, to the depths of South Sudan, and finally to the very spot where Tessa died. 
 
On his way Justin meets terror, violence, laughter, conspiracy and knowledge. But his greatest discovery is the woman he barely had time to love.

The Constant Gardener

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A mole, implanted by Moscow Centre, has infiltrated the highest ranks of the British Intelligence Service, almost destroying it in the process. And so former spymaster George Smiley has been brought out of retirement in order to hunt down the traitor at the very heart of the Circus - even though it may be one of those closest to him. 
 
The first part of le Carré's acclaimed Karla Trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy sees the beginning of the stealthy Cold War cat-and-mouse game between the taciturn, dogged Smiley and his wily Soviet counterpart.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Cold War is over and retired secret servant Tim Cranmer has been put out to pasture, spending his days making wine on his Somerset estate. But then he discovers that his former double agent Larry ­- dreamer, dissolute, philanderer and disloyal friend - has vanished, along with Tim's mistress. As their trail takes him to the lawless wilds of Russia and the North Caucasus, he is forced to question everything he stood for. 
 
Set in a fragmented, uncertain post-Soviet world, le Carré's brutal story of falsehoods and betrayal shows men playing dangerous games beyond their control.

Our Game

Alec Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in the shadow of the Berlin Wall for his British masters. He has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment. He must travel deep into the heart of Communist Germany and betray his country, a job that he will do with his usual cynical professionalism. But when George Smiley tries to help a young woman Leamas has befriended, Leamas's mission may prove to be the worst thing he could ever have done. In le Carré's breakthrough work of 1963, the spy story is reborn as a gritty and terrible tale of men who are caught up in politics beyond their imagining.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

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