20 books like Tinker, Tailor, Schoolmum, Spy

If anyone’s life seems perfect, you can be sure that it isn’t. Big Little Lies follows a group of school moms, in a nice neighborhood, who bond and support each other while hiding massive secrets.

Liane Moriarty is a master at crafting relatable characters who feel real, like people you know from the school gates, only more glamorous. The idyllic suburban setting is equally vivid, while the twists keep coming. This isn’t a typical whodunnit but an exploration of the truths women hide from themselves and each other.

You’ve probably read it already, but if you haven’t–grab it.

From one extreme to another!

The Push is a fast-paced suspense that had me on tenterhooks from start to finish and I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s about a woman, Blythe, who is determined to be a loving and kind mother to her new baby. But as the stress and relentlessness of early motherhood takes its toll, Blythe becomes increasingly convinced there’s something wrong with her daughter. The problem is that no one believes her.

This book reminded me of my early days of parenting, when I was sleep deprived, overwhelmed, and paranoid that I was a terrible mother. Looking back now, it really does feel like a distant memory and if you’re a new mother reading this, I promise you that this too shall pass. (Unless you’re Blythe perhaps…!) 

Mother and daughter relationships are a theme that I love to read – and write! – about and Joanna Glen does this brilliantly in All My Mothers.

From childhood, Eva had a complex relationship with her own mother and is convinced that there is more to her story than she’s been told. Glen uses a children’s picture book as a motif to explore the many kinds of mothers that Eva meets in her life and it affected me quite profoundly.

What kind of mother am I? What kind of mother do children most need? The relationship that made me most emotional was that between Eva and her best friend. Many tears were shed onto my kindle!

I’ve been a huge fan of Marian Keyes for years and I’ve read all her books.

She has a wonderful talent for character development and describing the intricacies of family life and relationships and she seamlessly combines chick-lit humour with meatier, serious themes. In The Break, a story about midlife crisis, Amy’s husband Hugh decides to take a break from their marriage and family, and go travelling to find himself, leaving her at home, a single mum, wondering what the heck has just happened. But will he return, and if he does, will Amy still be the same woman?

I was actually reading this book when I got the idea for my debut novel! 

My line of work has only enhanced my fascination with spies and spying. Espionage was on the periphery of my world and I was privy, on occasion, to snippets of information that shed light on certain events. Reading this book was like being privy to a host of secrets, many during my own era. How fascinating to be taken through the history of espionage from biblical times until today. The author reveals missing pieces to many significant moments in history, where monumental decisions were made based on information bought and sold, died for, killed for, stolen, or extracted by torture or coercion. Equally fascinating is how so much of that information was misinterpreted, denied, ignored, inflated, or simply misplaced. Great battles were won and lost, kingdoms toppled, fortunes spent and made, often based on a single snippet of information.

My preference is for authors to develop a series for their characters in order for me to fully embrace the depth of the character, if the character is worth developing. I enjoy picking up a novel in which I am familiar with the character as it makes it easier for me to relate to them.

The Spider Shepherd series is essential reading for me, and in particular this book. A book or two previously showed that Shepherd had finally healed enough, from his wife’s death, to find a new relationship. As a non-rule breaker, Shepherd shows that he will do what it takes to protect his family. The ending truly shocked me, leaving me chomping at the bit for the next one.

The main character becomes accidentally involved in international intrigue when he breaks into a house formerly owned by his father, which has become a government establishment. He becomes the target of both the British security services and the Russians, who believe he knows more than he does about the secret work carried on at the establishment. The book deals with his adventures and means of evading both Moscow and MI5.

I like and recommend this book, and others by this author, because of the theme of an ordinary individual being drawn into intention intrigue and finding his life in danger, together with what he does to evade capture both by the enemy and the police. Household also wrote his books with a cynical humour at times which I find absorbing.

From this novel’s opening lines—“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service”—Ian McEwan draws readers into the dreary and yet ominous world of Cold War England, circa 1974. 

The story purrs along like a well-oiled machine. Serena has an affair with an older man that ends badly, but not before her ex-lover sets her on an eventful career path with MI5.

Soon she’s recruited for an operation called “Sweet Tooth,” in which government channels funds are channeled to “acceptable” novelists so they can counter the effects of Soviet propaganda. 

In McEwan’s skillfully crafted prose and narrative power, we’re plunged deep inside this undercover world. 

The official history of MI5 similarly provides the first authorised account of another secret organisation. The book provides a far-reaching account of clandestine activities since its nascent beginnings as part of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, and across a period of 100 years. It offers a rare insight into some of the eyebrow-raising operations in counter-espionage, as well as an administrative overview, for an intelligence agency that is responsible for Britain’s security at home. It gives the first inside account from it archives, from Bolshevik threats and Communist subversive activities in the 1920s in Britain to Hitler’s spies in the 1930s, to the Double-Cross deception and agents of World War Two. It goes beyond the Second World War to name some of the traitors and spies of the Cold War. There is a clear understanding publicly for the first time of the sheer scale of surveillance of enemies or… show more.

The Portland Spy Ring was one of the first espionage cases exposed by Michał Goleniewski. Using MI5’s declassified files, Trevor Barnes tells the extraordinary story of how the discovery of a disillusioned British civil servant selling secrets from the Navy’s submarine research base at Portland revealed a shadowy world of deep-cover KGB spies operating under false identities stolen from the dead.