He named his four favorite Graham Greene novels for The Daily Beast. One title on the list:Our Man in HavanaRead about the other novels on Iyer's list.
Greene could be wickedly funny, and part of the power of his work comes from a sense of P.G. Wodehouse bumping into Kafka. This story of a mild-mannered English vacuum-cleaner salesman in louche, 1950s Havana who is somehow chosen to be an agent for British intelligence sets the scene for John le Carré’s The Tailor of Panama and innumerable other bittersweet thrillers about innocents caught in larger designs. It also gets Cuba, even as it is today, to perfection.
Our Man in Havana also made Alan Furst's five best list of spy books; it is one of Stella Rimington's six favorite secret agent novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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