“What are the best books about Espionage & Spying?” We looked at 465 of the top spy books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

Covertly slide into a world of secrets, lies, warring governments, and espionage. The top 18 books, all appearing 4 or more “Best Spy” lists, are ranked below by how many times they appeared and include images, descriptions, and links. The remaining 400+ titles, all appearing on 3 or fewer lists, as well as the articles we used, are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

Top 18 Spy & Espionage Books

18 .) Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Lists It Appears On:

• HiloBrow
• The Telegraph
• Medium
• The Guardian 2

Kim is set in an imperialistic world; a world strikingly masculine, dominated by travel, trade and adventure, a world in which there is no question of the division between white and non-white. Two men – a boy who grows into early manhood and an old ascetic priest, the lama – are at the center of the novel. A quest faces them both. Born in India, Kim is nevertheless white, a sahib. While he wants to play the Great Game of Imperialism, he is also spiritually bound to the lama. His aim, as he moves chameleon-like through the two cultures, is to reconcile these opposing strands, while the lama searches for redemption from the Wheel of Life.

Purchase / Learn More

17 .) The Company by Robert Littell

Lists It Appears On:

• NPR
• The Telegraph
• WHSmith
• Goodreads

This critically acclaimed blockbuster from internationally renowned novelist Robert Littell seamlessly weaves together history and fiction to create a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga of the CIA—known as “the Company” to insiders. Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the ’50s, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an amoral, elusive, formidable enemy—and each other—in an internecine battle within the Company itself. A brilliant, stunningly conceived epic thriller, The Company confirms Littell’s place among the genre’s elite.

Purchase / Learn More

16 .) The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

Lists It Appears On:

• Share Ranks
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• The Guardian 2

He is Harry Pendel: Exclusive tailor to Panama’s most powerful men. Informant to British Intelligence. The perfect spy in a country rife with corruption and revolution. What his “handlers” don’t realize is that Harry has a hidden agenda of his own. Deceiving his friends, his wife, and practically himself, he’ll weave a plot so fabulous it exceeds his own vivid imagination. But when events start to spin out of control, Harry is suddenly in over his head—thrown into a lethal maze of politics and espionage, with unthinkable consequences. . . .

Purchase / Learn More

15 .) A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

Lists It Appears On:

• Five Books
• HiloBrow
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• Electric Lit

A chance encounter with a Turkish colonel leads Charles Latimer, the author of a handful of successful mysteries, into a world of sinister political and criminal maneuvers. At first merely curious to reconstruct the career of the notorious Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue, Latimer soon finds himself caught up in a shadowy web of assassination, espionage, drugs, and treachery that spans the Balkans.

Purchase / Learn More

14 .) Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

Lists It Appears On:

• Addictive Boks
• Share Ranks
• The Culture Trip
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

“His code name was “The Needle.” He was a German aristocrat of extraordinary intelligence—a master spy with a legacy of violence in his blood, and the object of the most desperate manhunt in history. . . .

But his fate lay in the hands of a young and vulnerable English woman, whose loyalty, if swayed, would assure his freedom—and win the war for the Nazis. . . . “

Purchase / Learn More

13 .) Berlin Game by Len Deighton

Lists It Appears On:

• NPR
• The Telegraph
• The Strand Magazine
• The Culture Trip
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

Purchase / Learn More

12 .) From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

Lists It Appears On:

• Bookbub
• The Strand Magazine
• Flavorwire
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• The Telegraph

“James Bond is marked for death by the Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH in Ian Fleming’s masterful spy thriller, and the novel that President John F. Kennedy named one of his favorite books of all time.

SMERSH stands for “Death to Spies” and there’s no secret agent they’d like to disgrace and destroy more than 007, James Bond. But ensnaring the British Secret Service’s most lethal operative will require a lure so tempting even he can’t resist. Enter Tatiana Romanova, a ravishing Russian spy whose “defection” springs a trap designed with clockwork precision. Her mission: seduce Bond, then flee to the West on the Orient Express. Waiting in the shadows are two of Ian Fleming’s most vividly drawn villains: Red Grant, SMERSH’s deadliest assassin, and the sinister operations chief Rosa Klebb—five feet four inches of pure killing power.”

Purchase / Learn More

11 .) The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Lists It Appears On:

• HiloBrow
• The Strand Magazine
• The Culture Trip
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• The Guardian

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London’s Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be ‘a simple tale’ proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London’s fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.

Purchase / Learn More

10 .) The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer

Lists It Appears On:

• This Is Writing
• WHSmith
• Bookbub
• Book Browse
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

Milo Weaver has tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind by giving up his job as a “tourist” for the CIA―an undercover agent with no home, no identity. Now he’s working a desk at the agency’s New York headquarters. But when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into a colleague, exposing new layers of intrigue in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s been behind it allfrom the very beginning.

Purchase / Learn More

9 .) The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Lists It Appears On:

• Addictive Boks
• This Is Writing
• Crime Fiction Blog
• The Strand Magazine
• The Culture Trip
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

“The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world’s most heavily guarded man.

One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.”

Purchase / Learn More

8 .) The IPCRESS File by Len Deighton

Lists It Appears On:

• Addictive Boks
• HiloBrow
• The Week
• Crime Fiction Blog
• Flavorwire
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

Len Deighton’s classic first novel, whoseprotagonist is a nameless spy – later christened Harry Palmer and made famous worldwide in the iconic 1960s film starring Michael Caine.

Purchase / Learn More

7 .) The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Lists It Appears On:

• HiloBrow
• Share Ranks
• Crime Fiction Blog
• The Strand Magazine
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• The Guardian

“””I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,”” Graham Greene’s narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous “”Quiet American”” of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas.

As young Pyle’s well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But Fowler’s motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler’s beautiful Vietnamese mistress.”

Purchase / Learn More

6 .) Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Lists It Appears On:

• HiloBrow
• The Telegraph
• WHSmith
• The Culture Trip
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• Flavorwire
• Addictive Boks

MI6’s man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true…

Purchase / Learn More

5 .) The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré

Lists It Appears On:

• Addictive Boks
• HiloBrow
• Share Ranks
• Crime Fiction Blog
• The Telegraph
• The Culture Trip
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse—a desk job—Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service—with himself as the bait. In the background is George Smiley, ready to make the game play out just as Control wants.

Purchase / Learn More

4 .) The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

Lists It Appears On:

• HiloBrow
• Share Ranks
• Crime Fiction Blog
• The Telegraph
• WHSmith
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• The Guardian 2
• The Guardian

The classic spy novel by Erskine Childers, credited as the first work of modern espionage fiction. Set in pre-World War I Europe, two British subject, Carruthers and Davies, uncover secret German activity suggesting a prelude to war.

Purchase / Learn More

3 .) The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

Lists It Appears On:

• Best Science Fiction Books
• HiloBrow
• Share Ranks
• Crime Fiction Blog
• The Telegraph
• Bookbub
• The Strand Magazine
• The Culture Trip
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

His memory is a blank. His bullet-ridden body was fished from the Mediterranean Sea. His face has been altered by plastic surgery. A frame of microfilm has been surgically implanted in his hip. Even his name is a mystery. Marked for death, he is racing for survival through a bizarre world of murderous conspirators—led by Carlos, the world’s most dangerous assassin. Who is Jason Bourne? The answer may kill him.

Purchase / Learn More

2 .) The 39 Steps by John Buchan

Lists It Appears On:

• HiloBrow
• Oregon Live
• The Telegraph
• The Strand Magazine
• The Culture Trip
• The Guardian
• Share Ranks
• Crime Fiction Blog
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

Hanney, an expatriated Scot, returns from a long stay in South Africa to his flat in London. One night he is buttonholed by an American who appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe, and claims to be in fear for his life. Hannay lets the American hide in his flat, and returns later to find that another man has been found shot dead in the same building, apparently a suicide. Four days later Hannay finds the American stabbed to death…

Purchase / Learn More

1 .) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

Lists It Appears On:

• Cool Material
• HiloBrow
• Oregon Live
• The Culture Trip
• The Guardian
• The Week
• This Is Writing
• WHSmith
• The Strand Magazine
• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• Flavorwire
• NPR

The man he knew as “Control” is dead, and the young Turks who forced him out now run the Circus. But George Smiley isn’t quite ready for retirement—especially when a pretty, would-be defector surfaces with a shocking accusation: a Soviet mole has penetrated the highest level of British Intelligence. Relying only on his wits and a small, loyal cadre, Smiley recognizes the hand of Karla—his Moscow Centre nemesis—and sets a trap to catch the traitor.

Purchase / Learn More

The Additional Best Books About Spies and Espionage

34 Best Espionage & Spy Book Sources/Lists