Top ten espionage novels centering women’s stories

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. Sherwood's latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by 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 CrimeReads Sherwood tagged ten top espionage novels centering women’s stories, including:

Transcription by Kate Atkinson (2018)

Kate Atkinson’s Transcription follows Juliet Armstrong, recruited as a spy in 1940, through the Second World War and into the Cold War. The novel examines and dismantles our national institutions and myths, from the BBC to MI6, exploring what it means to be British and what it means to be a woman. Atkinson recreates the atmosphere of London vividly, but even more than that this novel is a masterclass in slippery point of view.

Read about another entry on the list.

Transcription is among Rebecca Starford's six great literary thrillers about espionage, spies, & double agents.

--Marshal Zeringue