Robert Littell has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 41 ratings. The most-rated is The Company.
The Company
Summary
Crisis constantly lurks around the corner, monitored by spies who are always with us. In his career-capping thirteenth novel, master of the espionage thriller Robert Littell has crafted a breathtaking story of the legendary CIA - "The Company" to insiders. At its heart lies a spectacular mole hunt involving the CIA, MI6, KGB and Mossad - a stunningly conceived trip down the rabbit hole to the labyrinthine Alice-in-Wonderland world of espionage, "a wood where things have no names." Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the 1950s - the front line of the simmering Cold War - the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that is amoral, elusive, and formidable. It also lays bare the internecine warfare within the company itself, adding another dimension to the spy vs. spy game.
©2013 Robert Littell (P)2013 Phoenix Audio
The Sisters
Summary
In what Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times called "the plot of plots", Robert Littell has created the CIA "legends" Francis and Carroll - dubbed "The Sisters Death and Night" by their cohorts. But few know what these enigmatic and extremely dangerous operatives do. They plot - and they're plotting the perfect crime. They've located the perfect pawn, the Potter, the exiled ex-head of the KGB sleeper school - and, with artful deception, the Sisters coerce him into betraying his last and best sleeper, the man he considers his son. Once awakened, this sleeper, an assassin living secretly in the US, will launch a mission of death - unless the Potter, in a desperate race against time, can stop his protegé from committing the Sisters' perfect and world-shattering crime.
©1986 Robert Littell (P)2003 New Millennium Audio, 2016 Phoenix Books
The Amateur
Summary
In a world of professionals, Charlie Heller is the Amateur, and he's at the center of a chillingly engrossing tale of espionage and intrigue, written by master-of-the-genre Robert Littell. In this "first-rate thriller" (Chicago Tribune), Charlie Heller is an ace cryptographer for the Company. He's a quiet man with a quiet job in a back office. But when terrorists shoot his fiancee in cold blood and Heller learns that the Agency has decided not to pursue those responsible, his life takes an abrupt turn. He was not a blackmailer but he will force the CIA's hand. He was not an assassin but he will penetrate the Iron Curtain with the intent to kill. Driven by an obsessive need for revenge, targeted for elimination by the CIA itself, Heller is an amateur with a one-in-a-million chance of success. With last year's publication of his New York Times best seller The Company, Robert Littell reestablished his position as one of our top writers of intelligent, ironic, and always entertaining espionage thrillers. After many years The Amateur, a cult classic among aficionados, is finally available in audio.
©1981 Robert Littell (P)2003 New Millenium Audio, All Rights Reserved.
Comrade Koba
Summary
A tight, captivating story of a naïve child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell After the sudden death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors, young Leon Rozental - intellectually precocious and possessing a disarming candor - is hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, a large building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work. One day, after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet officer with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. Through encounters between a naïve boy and a paranoid tyrant, Robert Littell creates in Comrade Koba a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing his human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he in?icted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible character - and not unlike Holden Caul?eld, whom he admits to identifying with - caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.
©2020 Robert Littell. Published in 2020 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS, New York. All rights reserved (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
The Once and Future Spy
Summary
An elite plan is afoot, a plan so secret and dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within the innermost core of the CIA. There is virtually no paper trail - but somehow the plan has sprung a leak and the plotters must urgently plug it - or face deadly consequences.
©1990 Robert Littell (P)2003 New Millennium Audio, All Rights Reserved
The Stalin Epigram
Summary
The Stalin Epigram is a masterful rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia's greatest poets of the 20th century. His heroic protest against the Stalin regime---particularly his outspoken criticism of the collectivization that drove millions of Russian peasants to starvation---finally reached its apex in 1934. When he composed a searing indictment of Stalin in a 16-line poem, secretly passed from person to person through recitation, the poet was arrested. It is widely accepted that Stalin himself was directly involved in Mandelstam's exile and his death in a Siberian transit camp in 1938. A master of historical detail and cultural authenticity, best-selling author Robert Littell based this novel in part on a memorable, intimate meeting with Mandelstam's wife in 1979. Narrated by Mandelstam's wife, his friends Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, and Mandelstam himself, this lucid account of the relationships between the artists, politicians, and proletariat of Stalinist Russia is an astounding moment in history brought to life by a perceptive, immensely talented writer.
©2006 Robert Littell (P)2009 Tantor
The Company
Summary
Robert Littell creates a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga of the ClA - "The Company" to insiders. The fictional and historical characters of Robert Littell's novel reveal much of the nearly 50 years of this complex and powerful organization. At the heart is a mole hunt involving the CIA, M16, KGB, and Mossad, a stunningly conceived trip down the rabbit hole to the labyrinthine Alice-in-Wonderland world of espionage, a "world where things have no names". Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the '50s, the front line of the simmering Cold War Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that is amoral, elusive, formidable. Littell also lays bare the internecine warfare within "The Company" itself, adding another dimension to the spy vs. spy game. An atmosphere of distrust pits the counter-intelligence agents behind the desks in Washington, like the utterly obsessive real-life mole hunter James Jesus Angleton, against the covert action boys in the field, like "The Company's" Harvey Torriti, The Sorcerer, a brilliant and brash rules breaker, and his Apprentice, Jack McAuliffe, recruited fresh out of Yale, who learns both tradecraft and the hard truths of life in the field. As this dazzling anatomy of the CIA unfolds, nothing less than the future is at stake. And the future is often only the day after tomorrow. At once a celebration of a long Cold War well fought and an elegy for the end of an era.
©2002 Robert Littell (P)2006 Phoenix Audio
Young Philby
Summary
An elegant, twisty spy story by a true master of the craft. Best-selling novelist Robert Littell employs all his considerable skills in telling the story of Kim Philby through the eyes of more than 20 true-life characters. As each layer is revealed, the question arises: Who really was this man? When Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most infamous double agent in history. A member of Britain's intelligence service since World War II, he had risen to become their chief officer in Washington, D.C. after the war. The exposure of other members of the group of double agents known as the Cambridge Five led to the revelation that he had been working for Russia for even longer than he had been part of MI6. Yet he escaped, and spent the last 25 years of his life in Moscow. In Young Philby, Robert Littell tells the story of the spy's early years. In the words of his friends, lovers, and Soviet handlers, we see the development of a fascinating, flawed man who kept people guessing about his ideals and allegiances until the very end.
©2012 Robert Littell (P)2012 Macmillan Audio
The Defection of A.J. Lewinter
Summary
Before there was The Company, Robert Littell made a name for himself with The Defection of A.J. Lewinter. Lewinter is an American scientist, for years an insignificant cog in America's complex defense machinery. While at an academic conference in Tokyo, Lewinter contacts the KGB station chief and says he wants to defect. He tantalizes the Russians with U.S. military secrets he claims to possess, but is his defection genuine? Neither the Russians nor the Americans are sure and Lewinter is swept up in a terrifying political chess match of deceit and treachery.Each side struggles to anticipate its opponent's next move and the superpowers are locked in a deadly contest that exploits friendships, destroys loyalties, and manipulates human beings as expendable pawns.
©2002 Robert Littell (P)2002 New Millennium Audio, All Rights Reserved