Currently reading
Hieroglyph: Stories and Blueprints for a Better Future
Ukraine: Zbig's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated
The Girl on the Train: A Novel
Our Souls at Night: A novel
Above the Waterfall
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Designs on Film: A Century of Hollywood Art Direction
The Homicide Report: Understanding Murder in America
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
The Gods of Mars
Red to Black
LeCarre in love! This is one of those books you hate to put down. It combines a riveting spy tale with a love story, offers a chilling portrait of how today’s Russia came to be and should scare the bejesus out of everyone. She is KGB, from a family of KGB. He is MI6, from a family of hippies. She is assigned to keep tabs on him. He spends a lot of time in Russia picking up information from an asset code-named Mikhail. Can two spies ever be really honest with each other? In his quest to learn the details of “The Plan,” is he in more danger from the east or the west? Can she really betray her country to be with him? Dryden offers a history lesson here, on post-Cold-War Russia, on Putin, the oligarchs, not only their dark motives towards Europe, but the ways and means by which they will prosecute their aims, and on some of the darker crevices of western banking. And he provides a wealth of insight into the machinations, the wheels and gears of both eastern and western intelligence.