Books by Robert Littell
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English
review 1: The blend between the well-researched, non-fiction elements concerning the characters and the rough progress of the plot in addition to the fictional details of the plot are really what makes this novel effective and worthwhile even to those not necessarily interested in the Stal...
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review 1: SPOILER ALERT. I'll be talking about a twist at the end of this book which you won't want to know if you're about to read it. It's an excellent book and the imagined dialogue really gives it a very realistic feel. I've read a lot about Philby, and I can certainly attest to the ac...
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review 1: I like historical fiction, and I give more leeway to an author writing historical fiction than I would to an author writing fiction. Having said that, this was a little too slow for me. Don't get me wrong, it is well written and the subject matter is (mostly) interesting, but the...
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review 1: Using the adult life, and death at the hands of the State, of Osip Mandelstam, The Stalin Epigram examines the atrocities of the Stalinist Era. Mandelstam, of course, was one of Russia's greatest poets. He ran afoul of the regime when, in 1933, he composed "The Stalin Epigram",...
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review 1: I suspect this noir detective novel will be more enjoyable to those who are not fans of Robert Littell's work. Littell's oeuvre consists of spy novels. Although uneven with a few not-so-good works, his good works are GREAT works (e.g., The Company, The Sisters, The Defection of A...
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review 1: Entertaining, thought-provoking, and thoroughly enjoyable. Littell uses first person with different narrators of each chapter to great effect as a way of exploring a possible early life of notorious spy Kim Philby. His book weaves a plausible and very engaging tale. As historical...
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review 1: I am fascinated by anything to do with espionage. That, and the fact that I recently read and enjoyed 'A Spy Among Friends' by Ben Macintyre, meant that I had high hopes of this fictionalised account of the early years of Kim Philby's cloak and dagger activities. Unfortunately,...
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review 1: Quite a surprise, in that this is very different from what I have previously read by Littell.It's actually sort of fun, but I began to lose patience towards the end. Initially, it read like a very clever satire of the standard hard-boiled private investigator genre. That dissip...