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This page lists novels and non-fiction by Robert Littell.

Cover images are when possible of the first US edition and a more recent digital or paperback edition.

By Robert Littell
- novels
- collaborative

Edited by Robert Littell
- non-fiction

The Defection of A. J. Lewinter

Robert Littell

1973

"A.J. Lewinter is an American scientist, for years an insignificant cog in America's complex defense machinery. Now he is playing both sides against the middle-telling the Russians he wants to defect and tantalizing them with U.S. military secrets he claims to posses. But is his defection genuine? Neither the Russians nor the Americans are sure, and as each side struggles to anticipate its opponent's next move, Lewinter is swept up in a terrifying chess match of deceit and treachery."

Sweet Reason

Robert Littell

1974

"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."

The October Circle

Robert Littell

1975

"Seven of Bulgaria's cultural elite-all disillusioned communists-and one American drifter find themselves staging an extremely dangerous protest that will set off a wave of repression and threatens to repay their heroism with death."

Mother Russia

Robert Littell

1978

"Robespierre Pravdin is a black marketeer who prowls Moscow's streets and alleys hustling wristwatches. Wishing only to survive in a city suffocated by paranoia and schizophrenia, Robespierre manages to make a tidy profit and stay under the state's radar-until, one day, he meets the woman called "Mother Russia" and becomes ensnared in the Byzantine and profoundly dangerous game of politics."

The Debriefing

Robert Littell

1979

"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."

The Amateur

Robert Littell

1981

"In this sleek and murderous novel, Charlie Heller is an ace cryptographer for the CIA, a quiet man in a quiet back-office job. But when his fiancée is murdered by terrorists and the Agency decides not to pursue her killers, Heller takes matters into his own hands. The fact that he is an amateur makes him all the more dangerous. Mind-blowing in its intelligence, pulse-pounding in its suspense, The Amateur is a stunner."

The Sisters

Robert Littell

1986

"Centering on Francis and Carroll, two enigmatic and extremely dangerous CIA legends dubbed 'the Sisters Death and Night,' The Sisters masterfully unveils an abyss of artful deception. By luring the Potter, a former head of the KGB sleeper school, into betraying his last and best assassin living secretly in the United States, Francis and Carroll set off a desperate race against time as the Potter tries to stop his protégé from committing the Sisters' exquisitely planned, world-shattering crime."

The Revolutionist

Robert Littell

1988

"When Alexander 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 Once and Future Spy: A Novel Of Obsession

Robert Littell

1990

"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?"

An Agent in Place

Robert Littell

1991

"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."

The Visiting Professor

Robert Littell

1994

"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 has not been allowed to cross the state's frontiers. Now, suddenly, his request for an exit visa is approved - a sure sign that the situation is even more chaotic than he had 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, and becomes a self-styled gumshoe tracking a serial killer."

Walking Back the Cat

Robert Littell

1997

"A Soviet-era KGB agent code-named Parsifal lives under deep cover in a small town in New Mexico, adjacent to a Apache reservation. A specialist in what the KGB describes as 'wetwork' and the rest of the world calls murder, Parsifal discovers, after years of dormancy, that he has a new 'Resident' - and he is given assassination orders that lead him to the nearby Apache-run casino. Meanwhile Finn, a disillusioned Gulf War vet who has come to New Mexico for some R & R gets drawn into the web when he discovers that someone is shaking down the casino."

The Company

Robert Littell

2002

"The Company is an engrossing, multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic yet utterly entertaining and candid saga bringing to life, through a host of characters --historical and imagined - the nearly 50 years of this secretive and powerful organization. In a style intelligent and ironic, Littell tells it like it was: CIA agents fighting not only 'the good fight' against foreign enemies, but sometimes the bad one as well, with the ends justifying such means as CIA-organized assassinations, covert wars, kidnappings, and toppling of legitimate governments. Behind every manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, though, one question spans the length of the book... Who is the mole within the CIA?"

Legends

Robert Littell

2005

"Martin Odum is a CIA field agent turned private detective, struggling his way through a labyrinth of past identities - "legends" in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Or is he Dante Pippen, an IRA explosives maven? Or Lincoln Dittmann, Civil War expert? These men like different foods, speak different languages, have different skills. Is he suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Can Odum trust the CIA psychiatrist? Or Stella Kastner, a young Russian woman who engages him to find her brother-in-law so he can give her sister a divorce. As Odum redeploys his dormant tradecraft skills to solve Stella's case, he travels the globe battling mortal danger and psychological disorientation."

Vicious Circle

Robert Littell

2006

" The action moves forward into the near future, when the global community, united under the leadership of a visionary woman president of the United States, brokers a major compromise between Israel and the Palestinian authority in the hopes of snuffing out the violent flash-point that fuels the flames of global terrorism. But then, Isaac Apflbaum, a well-known fundamentalist Rabbi, is taken hostage by Dr. al-Saath, a legendary Palestinian terrorist, who demands the release of several Palestinian prisoners in exchange for his prisoner. As Israel coaxes Elihu out of retirement to hunt down the terrorist who motivated his final mission, al-Saath and Apflbaum find themselves building an extraordinary relationship between hostage taker and hostage: parallels between these two battle-hardened partisans become the bonds that could lead to reconciliation. But with the Mossad strike team closing in, has the vicious circle already been closed."

The Stalin Epigram

Robert Littell

2009

"Moscow, 1934. As thousands of peasant famers starve under Stalin's regime of collectivisation, Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, defies the Kremlin with a few short, audacious lines of verse - a searing indictment of Stalin secretly recited to a handful of friends and fellow artists. When a transcript of the work falls into the hands of the secret police, the poet is taken from his home to Lubyanka prison under accusations of counter-revolutionary activities that carry the highest penalty, and his fate - as well as the fates of those close to him - is cast into bleak uncertainty. A fictional portrait based on a riverting historical episode, 'The Stalin Epigram' is narrated in turn by Mandelstam himself, his devoted wife, and his great friends the poets Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, amongst other vividly imagined characters."

Young Philby

Robert Littell

2012

"One midnight in January in the early 1960s, the Russian freighter Domatova quietly slipped out of Beirut harbour. The ship had sailed with a single passenger on board: an Englishman named Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed Kim. He had fled the Lebanese capital with little more than the clothes on his back. The Englishman had used both hardcover and paperback edition of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon for enciphering purposes (page, line and letter number) when he had communicated with his Soviet controllers. As the lights of Beirut vanished, he tried to imagine the life that awaited him in the Soviet Union. Would Moscow Centre welcome him into the Heart of Darkness as a senior Soviet intelligence officer? Would the Great Game the Englishman was so keen to play have a third act? For a spy, like a climber on a cliff, was there really no way out except up?."

A Nasty Piece of Work

Robert Littell

2013

"Former homicide detective and CIA agent Lemuel Gunn has left behind the Afghanistan battlefield for a trailer in New Mexico to forge a new career as a private investigator. Out of nowhere comes Ornella Neppi, a woman making a mess of her uncle's bail bonds business. She asks Gunn to track down the source of her troubles, a man named Emilio Gava, who has jumped bail after being arrested for buying cocaine. But no photos of Gava seem to exist. And once Gunn begins his search for a man it seems that someone is protecting, hitting dead end after dead end, he starts to suspect that Gava might not exist at all... As Gunn's game of cat and mouse unfolds - every step leading him nearer to the truth - he draws ever closer to an unseen enemy's line of fire."

The Mayakovsky Tapes

Robert Littell

2016

Subsequently published as Vladimir M.

"Moscow, March 1953: As Stalin breathes his last, four women meet in Room 408 of the luxurious hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose work they once inspired. Following his mysterious suicide twenty-five years earlier, he was canonised by Stalin as the “most talented poet of our Soviet era” – but in life he was a far more complicated man, violently torn between art and politics. As the four muses – who both loved and loathed him – piece together their conflicting memories of the poet, a portrait of the artist as a tormented young idealist emerges. Recalling Mayakovsky’s early years as a leader of the Futurists, his later work as a propagandist for the Soviet state, and the censorship battles that pitted him against the government, their unabashedly frank conversation reveals him as as an intense and tormented sexual obsessive caught in the eye of history’s storm, struggling to hold on to his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed."

If Israel Lost the War

Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein & Robert Littell

1969

An alternate history written as non-fiction.

The Czech Black Book

Prepared by the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences

Editor: Robert Littell

1969

A day by day eyewitness account of the Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

For the Future of Israel

Shimon Peres / Robert Littell

1998

"For the Future of Israel reveals the character of a leader who participated in the birth of his country and whose thoughts remain ever on the future - on the basis and prospects for peace. In five conversations with novelist and former Newsweek correspondent Robert Littell, Peres reflects on his youth in shtetl and kibbutz, the impact of the Holocaust on world affairs, what it means to be a Jew, and the ongoing struggle to end terrorism and forge peace between Israel and its neighbors. The interviews reflect the changed State of Israel since the assassination of Yitzak Rabin (after which Peres was named prime minister and defense minister) and the subsequent election of a Likud-led government in Israel and its renegotiation of the Oslo agreements. Peres speaks candidly of his dealings with Arafat and of his close, complementary relationship with Rabin. Ranging widely over the last fifty years, he ponders the effect of the occupation of the territories on the character of his country. He gives his views on public figures he has known (among them Ben Gurion, Mitterrand, Reagan, Netanyahu, Yeltsin, and Clinton), the qualities of good leadership, and the dangers of extremism and religious parties."