Robert Littell

The Company

"In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Metropole Hotel. They have gathered, not altogether willingly, to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. Each of these ladies loved Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their memories of him, a portrait of the artist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to years as a propagandist for the Revolution, to the censorship battles that turned him against the State, Mayakovsky is revealed as a passionate, complex man who lived at the center of history and fought to hold onto his ideals even in the face of a world changing for the worse. The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that captures the tumultuous life of one of the most significant writers of the Soviet era"--

A Novel

The Mayakovsky Tapes

A tale inspired by the life of forefront twentieth-century Russian poet Osip Mandelstam recounts his outspoken criticism of the Stalin regime, the verbal distribution of his famous "Stalin Epigram" that led to his arrest, and his subsequent exile and death in a Siberian transit camp.

The Stalin Epigram

Martin Odum, disgraced CIA field agent turned private detective in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is struggling his way through a labyrinth of memories of past identities - 'legends' in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Is he Dante Pippen, IRA explosives maven turned CIA agent? Or is he another legend? These men speak different languages, like different foods and women, and have different skills, and Odum's not sure if he's suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing or just plain exhaustion. When Odum is employed to solve a case for a young Russian, Stella Kastner, he is drawn back into the world he left not remembering quite why, struggling to untangle his true identity while under the strains of mortal danger and psychological disorientation. An extraordinarily intelligent thriller, taut and explosive, Legends is an unrelentingly arresting page-turner.

Legends (New Ed)

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

The Once and Future Spy

A Novel of Chaos

The Visiting Professor

Working as a private investigator in New Mexico, former CIA agent Lemuel Gunn comes to the aid of Ornella Neppi, who, making a mess out of her uncle's bail bonds business, needs his help in bringing in an elusive criminal who jumped bail. 30,000 first printing.

A Nasty Piece of Work

Edward Klein

Richard Z. Chesnoff

If Israel Lost the War

An epic saga of the Soviet Union's brutal first decades-from The New York Times bestselling master of espionage. Hailed as "the American le Carré," Robert Littell presents an ambitious novel about star-crossed idealist Alexander Til. When Til returns from America to Petrograd on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917, it is to put his life on the line in the hope of transforming Russia. But after witnessing the birth of a new era, he watches the people, and his own ideals, trampled by the rise of Josef Stalin-with whom Til is destined to have a shattering confrontation. Taking readers from the storming of the Winter Palace to the nightmares of the gulag, The Revolutionist is a masterwork of historical fiction.

The Revolutionist

A republication of a long-unavailable earlier work follows the personal vendetta of cryptographer Charlie Heller against those responsible for murdering his fiancée, an endeavor that pits him against the CIA and takes him behind the Iron Curtain. Reprint.

The Amateur

Dans l'Europe des années trente débute la plus intrigante carrière de l'histoire de l'espionnage : celle de Philby. Ce jeune Anglais, recruté par les services de renseignements russes, part couvrir la guerre d'Espagne en tant que journaliste pour le Times. Mais de quel côté est-il vraiment ? Est-il passé dans le camp du KGB ? Est-il en réalité toujours resté fidèle à la CIA ? A moins qu'il n'ait rejoint le camp de Franco, comme tout porte à le croire ?

portrait de l'espion en jeune homme

Philby

Robespierre Pravdin, a hustler from the future with a victim's instincts is set loose on the streets of an unsuspecting Moscow and ends up in a boarding house whose other residents add to his vision and dreams of Mother Russia

Mother Russia

A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2012 A Kansas City Star Top Book the Year When Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most notorious double agent in the history of espionage. Recruited into His Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service at the beginning of World War II, he rose rapidly in the ranks to become the chief liaison officer with the CIA in Washington after the war. The exposure of other members of the group of British double agents known as the Cambridge Five led to the revelation that Philby had begun spying for the Soviet Union years before he joined the British intelligence service. He eventually fled to Moscow one jump ahead of British agents who had come to arrest him, and spent the last twenty-five years of his life in Russia. In Young Philby, Robert Littell recounts the little-known story of the spy's early years. Through the words of Philby's friends and lovers, as well as his Soviet and English handlers, we follow the evolution of a mysteriously beguiling man who kept his masters on both sides of the Iron Curtain guessing about his ultimate loyalties. As each layer of ambiguity is exposed, questions surface: What made this infamous double (or should that be triple?) agent tick? And, in the end, who was the real Kim Philby?

Young Philby

A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell After the sudden death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors, young Leon Rozental—intellectually precocious and possessing a disarming candor—is hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, a large building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work. One day after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet officer with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. Through encounters between a naive boy and a paranoid tyrant, Robert Littell creates in Comrade Koba a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing his human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inï¬‚icted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible character—and not unlike Holden Caulï¬?eld, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.

Comrade Koba

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

The October Circle

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.

Robert Littell

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