I'd like to issue a challenge to my Hubski friends. I have two friends who have become famous novelists of spy novels, spanning WWII through the Cold War era. A couple of their stories have been (or are being) made into movies, even. But I have not taken the time to dig through their books! I don't read a lot anymore, and when I do it tends to be on practical topics, rather than speculative ones. --- The first one is Fulbright Scholar, Olen Steinhauer. He came to Hungary while I was living there, and fell into my group of friends. (Many writers in this group.) Olen is a great dude, and fell in love with the woman who ran the crew that was renovating my flat. They've now been married for eons, and have a daughter, and live between Budapest and NYC. His first big hit - that then became a movie - was The Tourist, although Bridge of Sighs was my first, and I remember loving it. --- The second one is war correspondent, author, biographer, and journalist Adam LeBor. As a journalist working in the Balkans during the wars there, he was on the front lines, in a flak jacket, before "embedded journalists" became a term. He wrote extensively on the wars, their reasons for being, and their impacts, and eventually wrote the definitive biography of Slobodan Milosevic, who single-handedly destroyed Yugoslavia and turned the Balkans into a 3rd world region. He then wrote gorgeous non-fiction books, like A Heart Turned East (about Muslims living outside of the Middle East, and how they lived their beliefs in cultures where they weren't necessarily supported), and City of Oranges (interviews with multiple generations of Muslims, Jews, and Christians living next to each other in Jaffa, and how their worlds have changed over time). But he and I both had a deep and abiding love for the Cold War spy novels of Alan Furst. Adam always wanted to write something like Furst did, but didn't have a story yet, and didn't have experience writing fiction. Then, during the research phase for his non-fiction book on Hitler's Secret Bankers, Adam discovered some very interesting documents, and a conspiracy plot, that seeded his idea for his first a Cold War spy novel, The Budapest Protocol. It was a fun book for me to read, because his characters are all based loosely off people we knew mutually. I'm even named in the Thank Yous! He has gone on to write two different series of novels, featuring the same characters, and his books have been very well received. --- I'd love to hear more about both Olen and Adam's books from Hubski! Anyone into spy novels? Wanna read any of these and report back? Could be a fun book club/thread idea, with some specific link back to Hubski!