Ten top books about the Cold War

Francesca Kay is the author of three novels: An Equal Stillness (2009), The Translation of the Bones (2011), which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and The Long Room (2016). One of her top ten books about the Cold War, as shared at the Guardian:

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

The cold war as comedy. Wormald, a vacuum cleaner salesman and inadvertent spy, sends British intelligence into a spin with his scale drawings of the parts of “the Atomic Pile Cleaner”. Greene called this novel an entertainment, but like all the best jokes it has a serious side, and is a reminder that the cold war was not only waged between superpowers but also sucked in a lot of smaller nations.

Read about another entry on the list.

Our Man in Havana also made Jesse Armstrong's top ten list of comic war novels, Allegra Frazier's top five list of books to remind you of warmer climes, Pico Iyer's list of four essential novels by Graham Greene and Alan Furst's five best list of spy books; it is one of Stella Rimington's six favorite secret agent novels.

--Marshal Zeringue