100 books like The Woman All Spies Fear

I love this book because Wilkinson takes politics, race, romance, along with the good, the bad, and the ugly of the intelligence community and wraps it up in a bow of deeply evocative writing that kept me twisted up.

Just a quick teaser to show my love of her writing: “I unlocked the safe beneath my desk, grabbed my old service automatic, and crept toward my bedroom doorway, stealthy until I was brought to grief by a Lego Duplo that stung the sole of my foot.” [Insert sobbing emoji here for how much I love this line] Her writing had me jabbing my husband every few minutes, going, “Read this. READ THIS!”

I loved that each answer solved in the book simply raised more questions, and I was left wondering if the answers were even answers in the first place. The abrupt ending is the satisfyingly frustrating icing on the… show more.

As both a writer and a reader, I fell in love with this book (well, as a writer, I was also wildly jealous of how easy Cole makes it look, but that’s another story) because she takes a fraught subject—interracial romance during the Civil War—and managed to create a spy romance that I simply could not put down until I turned the last page.

Often with spy novels, there’s an emphasis on heroism, but what I appreciated about this book was how the emphasis was on Elle doing heroic things all in the pursuit of wanting to live a quiet, boring life with the man she loves (Malcolm).

It's a great series, and I’m hoping Cole goes back to tell the story of Malcolm’s sister.

I first heard of Pompouras from her role on a reality TV show Spy Games, but Becoming Bulletproof hooked me with her tale of her time as a Secret Service agent. It’s not a thriller, but don’t tell that to my heart rate as she described her experience of being in New York on 9/11.

I love the way she speaks about the challenges faced as a woman in her field and how she didn’t let the naysayers hold her back. I’ve referred to her book time and time again in my own work both for inspiration, and it’s a great handbook on the tips and tricks of how to read and influence people.  

Do I judge a book by its cover? Why yes, yes I do! And the moment I saw this gorgeous cover I put it right into my shopping cart, paid full price, and never looked back.

Luckily for me, Women in Intelligence happens to be an excellent book where the content more than matched the expectations I had from the fabulous artwork. Although there are a few familiar faces that appear, most of the women were completely new to me. Not the femme fatales of popular culture; these were patriotic women who often went unseen in the background.

I love that Fry truly delves into uncovering the unsung heroines of WWI and WWII, giving these quiet, determined women a chance to be recognized and to shine.

Though it is set just after the war, the characters in this novel cannot escape from their memories of the Holocaust or guilt at having survived. Yet they are also stuck in a comic scenario—through a complex series of events, the Jewish protagonist Herman has wound up with three “wives,” his first wife from before the war who he mistakenly assumed dead, the Polish Catholic peasant who hid him from the Nazis and he married out of gratitude, and his mistress and fellow survivor he met upon relocating to New York. The novel is both hilarious and heart-breaking—a potent reminder of the impossibility of ever leaving behind the worst horrors of this war.   

A direct inspiration on my book, this is a great espionage thriller set in Philadelphia about a disgraced Revolution-era spy who gets hired by Alexander Hamilton to help against his arch-enemy, Thomas Jefferson, and finds his path intersecting with a farmwife standing up against a frontier uprising.

Liss is a master of the historical form (and a friend, full disclosure!)

Literature, because it is less rule-bound than science and philosophy, may be more suited to exploring the question of who we really are, can be, and should be. Rebecca Goldstein, who earned degrees in physics and philosophy before turning to fiction, has written several novels that touch on the mind-body problem. My favorite is her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, the funny, sexy, poignant tale of a young philosopher’s quest to solve the mind-body problem.

The first few years of marriage can often be the most challenging. Luckily Sean Perron and Spencer Harmon (with some help from their wives) have written this series of “love letters” to newly married couples. In them, they address many common difficulties newlyweds face, from finances to sex. This is a great resource for not only couples, but those in a dating relationship or single as well!

Is One Day a modern classic? After the hype had died down, I bought a battered copy second-hand from a charity shop. Over a decade since reading it, I still mentally return to Dex and Em: what was and what could’ve been.

There’s also something in the beautiful narrative structure – where we see both sides of their story over time – that makes me ponder the way we can never fully know another person. Even when they are familiar to us. Perhaps especially then.

This book is a fearsomely clever collection of essays on love, marriage, and adultery, all written through the lens of trying to better understand the complexity of the human heart. Touching and tender, these explorations of relationships are wincingly honest and clearly written straight from the writer’s heartfelt experience

There is a purity of emotional intelligence to the book, which I find reassuring. Reading about the writers' relationship f*ck-ups, which they stumble into as if falling into potholes, made me feel okay about my own stumbling efforts to navigate my emotional life.