Six top literary thrillers about espionage, spies, & double agents

Rebecca Starford is the author of Bad Behaviour, a memoir about boarding school and bullying. The book has been optioned for television by Matchbox Pictures.

Starford’s first novel, The Imitator, is out now in Australia, and in the United States, Canada, the UK and South Africa under the title An Unlikely Spy.

She is also the co-founder and publishing director of Kill Your Darlings, and has previously worked for Text Publishing and Affirm Press. She is a freelance editor and creative writing teacher.

Originally from Melbourne, Starford currently lives in Brisbane, Australia, with her partner, son and many pets.

At CrimeReads she tagged six great literary thrillers about espionage, spies, and double agents, including:

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

I have never read anything quite like The Sympathizer. I say “read”, but in fact I first consumed this Pulitzer-Prize winning novel in audio, with Francois Chau narrating, which is an absolute delight. Chau’s rich, mellifluous voice gives a wearied yet determined detachment to this story of a North Vietnamese mole, who after the fall of Saigon remains embedded a South Vietnamese community in exile in the United States. This novel is mind-blowingly good, a pyrotechnic demonstration of style, mashing up a range of fictional genres, including mystery, meta-fiction, comedy and, of course, espionage. The Janus-like nature a spy’s character, the moral ambiguity of which the novel works to reflect back to the reader, is captured succinctly in the opening lines: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.” The Sympathizer is brilliant.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Sympathizer is among Siobhan Adcock's six crime books that explore the experience of veterans and Shelley Wood's five top epistolary novels.

--Marshal Zeringue