Thursday, August 24, 2023

Top 10 female spies in fiction

Kim Sherwood is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Her first novel, Testament (2018), won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. Her latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”

At the Guardian Sherwood tagged her top ten female spies in fiction, including:
American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson (2019)

As a black FBI agent in the 1960s, Marie Mitchell’s career is thwarted by the all-white boys’ club until she is handed a mission to seduce and undermine the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso. Lauren Wilkinson illuminates the untold stories of the cold war in a searing exploration of belonging, race and gender.
Read about the other entries on the list.

American Spy is among Sarah Stewart Taylor's five mystery novels about characters searching for relatives.

--Marshal Zeringue