Robert Littell

Robert Littell has been ranked amongst John Le Carré and Graham Greene for his masterful spy fiction. A Newsweek journalist in a previous incarnation, Littell has been writing about the Soviet Union and Russians since his first novel, the espionage classic The Defection of A.J.Lewinter. Among his numerous critically acclaimed novels  are The October Circle, Mother Russia, The Debriefing, The Sisters, The Revolutionist, The Once and Future Spy, An Agent in Place, The Visiting Professor, the New York Times bestselling The Company (adapted for a TNT mini-series), and Legends (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best Thriller of 2005) and For the Future of Israel, a book of conversations with Shimon Peres.

Robert Littell’s new novel,

BRONSHTEIN IN THE BRONX,

out with Soho Press in January 2025

Bronshtein in the Bronx

On Saturday, January 13, 1917, an ocean liner docks in New York Harbor. Among the disembarking emigrants is one Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—better known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky. Bronshtein has been on the run for a decade, driven from his beloved Russia after escaping political exile in Siberia, his companion and two sons in tow. He lives and would die for a worker’s revolution, at any cost—but is he ready to become an American? In the weeks leading up to the February Revolution that will see Lenin’s Bolsheviks in power, Bronshtein haunts the streets, newspaper offices, and socialist gathering places of New York City, wrestling with the difficult questions of his personal revolutionary ideology, his place in his own family, his relationship to Lenin, and, above all, his conscience.

(Soho Press, January 2025)

A Plague on Both Your Houses

On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a ten-minute televised speech announcing his resignation as Soviet president. Moments later, with little pomp and less circumstance, the red flag was lowered from its floodlit perch atop the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Into the vacuum—before a new democracy had time to put down roots—surged the Russian mafia, supplying what the new state could not: krysha, or “roof”—protection for the privately owned businesses sprouting across the country. Rivalries turned bloody as Moscow’s Jewish mafia battled the Ossete vory v zakone (literally “thieves-in-law”) for control of the city. Caught up in the mayhem, Yulia, only daughter of the Jewish mafia godfather, and Roman, only son of the Ossete mafia godfather, are obliged to navigate the minefield of a star-crossed love affair as they attempt to escape a destiny that appears preordained.

A Plague on Both Your Houses is the fictional story of one bloody episode in Moscow’s Great Turf War, when clans fought brutally in the streets and the future of the Russian nation was anything but assured.

(Blackstone Publishing, February 2024)