Sponsored by Cinder Block Publishing and Terribilita by Ben Wyckoff Shore.
The rebel caprices of Enzo Ferrando have dire consequences. His father, the Risorgimento war hero, is gunned down on his veranda. His son Lucca is forced into hiding as a deckhand on a merchant ship. Enzo himself is conscripted into the Italian army and forced to wage war on the African Horn, yet he yearns to take vengeance on his father’s killers and to reunite with his son. “Mastery of storytelling makes Terribilita a powerful and emotive read that all literary, historical and family drama fans will devour” (Readers’ Favorite, 5/5 Stars)
Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!
This week’s pick is American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson.
Content warning: Home invasion, some violence–sorry, I don’t remember anything else!
American Spy is one of my favorite books of 2019, and even a full year later I still cannot shut up about this book! It’s about Marie Mitchell, a Black FBI agent working in the 1980s. Her ambitions are high, but her career has stalled out thanks to racism and sexism in her home office, and she’s not really sure what the future holds for her. Then she’s recruited by the CIA for a one-off mission that turns into an ongoing, overseas assignment: spying on Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, first on his U.S. visit and then in his own country. Marie is cautious, but she takes the job. Thomas is intellectually engaging, charismatic, and sensitive, a born leader despite his tendency towards Communist values. It’s not long before Marie finds herself agreeing with his politics more often than not, and increasingly uneasy about the level of U.S. meddling with foreign affairs…and when violence breaks out, she must act quickly to establish where her loyalties lie.
This is an absolutely stellar spy thriller, and I’m so excited about it because it centers a Black woman–in the ’80s and ’90s, no less! It’s also beautifully written, structured as Marie’s letters to her young children, written in the ’90s as she looks back on her choices to get involved with the mission to spy on Sankara, and the fallout which persists to her present day. There’s also a strong subplot involving Marie’s sister, whose career choices inspired Marie’s journey to the FBI, and whose mysterious death has haunted her for years. This book is intense, but not in the traditional spy thriller way. There aren’t endless shoot-out scenes and high speed car chases, but there are deeply unsettling meetings, mysterious strangers, and shady dealings that force Marie to question her moral compass, the motivations of every one around her, and what it means to be a good person, a good spy, a good mother, and a good American. If you’re looking for a deeply human spy novel, then you cannot go wrong with this book. Bonus: I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated brilliantly by Bahni Turpin, one of my favorite narrators.
Happy reading!
Tirzah
Find me on Book Riot, the Insiders Read Harder podcast, All the Books, and Twitter.
If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, click here to subscribe.