Alan Furst's list

Alan Furst, the acclaimed author of nine World War II spy novels, including Night Soldiers, Dark Voyage, Kingdom of Shadows, and The Foreign Correspondent, came up with a list of favored books for The Week magazine.

Among his picks:

Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel

Babel was one of the great Russian writers of his generation — a Jewish journalist who rode with Budyonny’s Cossacks in the civil wars following the 1917 revolution. He was arrested and shot in 1940. Who knows what great books he might have written.

The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov

Bulgakov is famous for The Master and Margarita, but this is an adventure novel of the Russian Revolution, and hard to put down once you start. Very few honest books about this time survive — the Soviet secret police made sure of that. But here is one that did.

Read the entire list.

--Marshal Zeringue