Alan Furst's Reading List

The author of “Mission to Paris” and, most recently, “Midnight in Europe” is a great fan of John le Carré’s Karla trilogy. “George Smiley is the all-time harassed bureaucrat of spy fiction.”

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By the Book: Alan Furst (2014)

NYT By the Book column (2014-05-29).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Titian: His Life

Sheila Hale · Buy on Amazon

"What I especially like about the book is that it is also a dense history of Venice in the 16th century: kings, doges, emperors, popes, Ottoman invasions."

The Broken Road

Patrick Leigh Fermor · Buy on Amazon

"they are transcendent works, narratives of Leigh Fermor's walk across Europe in the early 1930s — descriptions of lands and their people in the most elegant, beautiful prose to be found anywhere."

A Dance to the Music of Time

Anthony Powell · Buy on Amazon

"Powell does everything a novelist can do, from flights of aesthetic passion to romance to comedy high and low. His dialogue is extraordinary. Anthony Powell taught me to write."

A Coffin for Dimitrios

Eric Ambler · Buy on Amazon

"The book had a powerful, inspiring effect on me as a novelist."

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John le Carre · Buy on Amazon

"Le Carre's voice — patrician, cold, brilliant and amused — was perfect for the wilderness-of-mirrors undertow of the Cold War."