“A beautiful, gracious act of connection with a man who kept his secrets.” — Kirkus Reviews Readers will not only find absorbing narratives but also the early signs of America’s now highly contentious culture wars. — Booklist An exceptional work ... about a man ... whose family album is pasted into a book of American history. — Baltimore Sun A passionately researched and engaging memoir...poignantly distanced. — New York Times Book Review

In this moving and compelling memoir about parent and child, father and daughter, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, nearly impassive man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he began revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life as he became afflicted with Alzheimer's. His exploits revealed a man of remarkable bravado -- posing as a Nazi guard, slipping behind enemy lines to blow up ammunition dumps, and being flown to one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies to report on the atrocities found there. My Father's Secret War is an intimate account of Franks coming to know her own father after years of estrangement. Looking back at letters he had written her mother in the early days of WWII, Franks glimpses a loving man full of warmth. But after the grimmest assignments of the war his tone shifts, settling into an all-too-familiar distance. Franks learns about him -- beyond the alcoholism and adultery -- and comes to know the man he once was. Her story is haunting, and beautifully told, even as the tragedy becomes clear: Franks finally comes to know her father, but only as he is slipping further into his illness. Lucinda Franks understands her father as the disease claims him. My Father's Secret War is a triumph of love over secrets, and a tribute to the power of the connection of family.

In Spy Runner, a noir mystery middle grade novel from Newbery Honor author Eugene Yelchin, a boy stumbles upon a secret that jeopardizes American national security. It's 1953 and the Cold War is on. Communism threatens all that the United States stands for, and America needs every patriot to do their part. So when a Russian boarder moves into the home of twelve-year-old Jake McCauley, he's on high alert. What does the mysterious Mr. Shubin do with all that photography equipment? And why did he choose to live so close to the Air Force base? Jake’s mother says that Mr. Shubin knew Jake’s dad, who went missing in action during World War II. But Jake is skeptical; the facts just don’t add up. And he’s determined to discover the truth—no matter what he risks. Godwin Books

In the 1930s Tom Burns was a rising star of British publishing, whose friends and authors included G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, the artist Eric Gill and the poet David Jones. And among his glittering social circle he had set his heart on the beautiful Ann Bowes-Lyon, cousin of the Queen. When war was declared in 1939, Burns joined the Ministry of Information, effectively the propaganda wing of the secret services. Sent to Madrid as press attaché at the British Embassy, where the Ambassador was the formidable and very Proetstant Sir Samuel Hoare, Burns used his faith and his deep love of Spain in the propaganda war against the Nazis, who at the time had nearly unrestricted access to the Spanish media. Burns' brief was to do all in his power to keep Franco neutral and so protect Gibraltar and access to the western Mediterranean. The strategy was simple, but the tactics were more complicated, especially when Burns found he had begun to make enemies at home, not least among them Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, head of the MI6's Iberian section. By 1941 he felt far from the real fighting, Ann had pledged herself to another man, and Burns was spending as much time protecting his back as fighting the Nazis. How he overcame these odds, was involved in the Man Who Never Was decoy plot, arranged Leslie Howard's fatal propaganda trip to Portugal and Spain, and finally found true love while loyally serving his country is the story told in this extraordinary book by his son.

When Declan Keenan begins to clean out his family’s house after his father’s death, he makes an unexpected discovery. His father, a former RCMP Security Service agent, left a videotape message that drops responsibility for resolving an old case into his son’s lap. Unable to refuse his father’s dying wish, Declan begins his search for answers in an attempt to satisfy justice. In the process, the motive, means, and opportunities that led to the 1973 bombing of BOAC Flight 281 are revealed; but so too are the agendas to have the case buried. Solving this thirty-year-old case with its inherent obstacles and challenges is frustratingly elusive, especially when compounded by present-day tragedy and official cover-ups. Despite threats, destruction of evidence, and murder, Declan perseveres, knowing that he must do his utmost to reveal his father’s secret and expose a long hidden truth. This entertaining thriller resonates with the themes of justice and injustice, reconciliation and alienation, and duty and denial—together representing both the admirable and dishonourable aspects of the Canadian national identity.

Soon to be an Apple TV+ animated series starring Golden Globe nominee Beanie Feldstein and Emmy Award winner Jane Lynch, it's no secret that Harriet the Spy is a timeless classic that kids will love! Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together? "What the novel showed me as a child is that words have the power to hurt, but they can also heal, and that it’s much better in the long run to use this power for good than for evil."—New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot

A riveting true-life thriller and revealing memoir from the daughter of an American intelligence officer—the astonishing true story of two spies and their families on opposite sides of the Cold War. In the summer of 1975, seventeen-year-old Eva Dillon was living in New Delhi with her family when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a U.S. State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA’s highest-ranking double agent—Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov—a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon’s father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s. At the height of the Cold War, the Russian offered the CIA an unfiltered view into the vault of Soviet intelligence. His collaboration helped ensure that tensions between the two nuclear superpowers did not escalate into a shooting war. Spanning fifty years and three continents, Spies in the Family is a deeply researched account of two families on opposite sides of the lethal espionage campaigns of the Cold War, and two men whose devoted friendship lasted a lifetime, until the devastating final days of their lives. With impeccable insider access to both families as well as knowledgeable CIA and FBI officers, Dillon goes beyond the fog of secrecy to craft an unforgettable story of friendship and betrayal, double agents and clandestine lives, that challenges our notions of patriotism, exposing the commonality between peoples of opposing political economic systems. Both a gripping tale of spy craft and a moving personal story, Spies in the Family is an invaluable and heart-rending work. Spies in the Family includes 25 black-and-white photos.

For forty years John Hadden and his father of the same name fought at the dinner table over politics, art, and various issues concerning America. One was haunted by what he had witnessed during his long CIA career, from Berlin to Tel Aviv; the other retreated to the Vermont woods to direct Shakespeare until finally he confronted his father at the table one last time with a tape recorder. Conversations with a Masked Man is a series of conversations Hadden had with his father about the older man’s thirty-year career as a CIA officer and how American policy affected the family and the world. Father and son talk about John senior’s early life as a kid in Manhattan, his training at West Point, the stench of bodies in Dresden after the war, Berlin and Vienna in the late forties and fifties at the height of the Cold War, the follies of the Cuban missile crisis, how he disobeyed orders to bomb Cairo while he was station chief in Israel during the Six-Day War, and treacherous office politics in Washington. The story unfolds in dialogue alternating with the writer’s own memories and reflections. What emerges is hilarious, unexpectedly candid, and deeply personal. Combining the candid descriptions of the world of the CIA with intimate conversations between a father and son, this book is written for the political junkie, the psychologist, the art lover, or anybody who wonders who the hell their father really is.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

“A beautiful, gracious act of connection with a man who kept his secrets.” — Kirkus Reviews Readers will not only find absorbing narratives but also the early signs of America’s now highly contentious culture wars. — Booklist An exceptional work ... about a man ... whose family album is pasted into a book of American history. — Baltimore Sun A passionately researched and engaging memoir...poignantly distanced. — New York Times Book Review