
American Spy
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Bahni Turpin
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By:
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Lauren Wilkinson
About this listen
“American Spy updates the espionage thriller with blazing originality.” (Entertainment Weekly)
“There has never been anything like it.” (Marlon James, GQ)
“So much fun.... Like the best of John le Carré, it’s extremely tough to put down.” (NPR)
Named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year By Chicago Tribune and One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • BuzzFeed • Vulture • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping • The New York Public Library
What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love?
It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young Black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes.
Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Sankara is doing for his country. Yes, even though she is still grieving the mysterious death of her sister, whose example led Marie to this career path in the first place. Yes, even though a furious part of her suspects she’s being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent.
In the year that follows, Marie will observe Sankara, seduce him, and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American.
Inspired by true events - Thomas Sankara is known as “Africa’s Che Guevara” - American Spy knits together a gripping spy thriller, a heartbreaking family drama, and a passionate romance. This is a face of the Cold War you’ve never seen before, and it introduces a powerful new literary voice.
Nominated for the NAACP Image Award
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
“Spy fiction plus allegory, and a splash of pan-Africanism. What could go wrong? As it happens, very little. Clever, bracing, darkly funny, and really, really good.” (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
“Inspired by real events, this espionage thriller ticks all the right boxes, delivering a sexually charged interrogation of both politics and race.” (Esquire)
“Echoing the stoic cynicism of Hurston and Ellison, and the verve of Conan Doyle, American Spy lays our complicities - political, racial, and sexual - bare. Packed with unforgettable characters, it’s a stunning book, timely as it is timeless.” (Paul Beatty, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sellout)
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How Did This Escape Me?
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Critic reviews
“An expertly written spy thriller...that tackles issues of politics, race, and gender.... Like the best of John le Carré, it’s extremely tough to put down. It marks the debut of an immensely talented writer who’s refreshingly unafraid to take risks, and has the skills to make those risks pay off.” (NPR)
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Featured Article: The Best Women Narrators to Listen to Right Now
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Story
On a Spring afternoon in London, Sam hops the stairs of his flat two at a time. There’s £1,300 missing from his and his wife, Efe’s, shared bank account and his calls are going straight to voicemail. When he finally reaches someone, he learns Efe is nearly 5,000 miles away as their toddler looks around and asks, “Where’s Mummy?”
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Wow
- By Anon on 03-16-25
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Song of a Captive Bird
- A Novel
- By: Jasmin Darznik
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is told that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest. She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel - gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother's walled garden, venturing to the forbidden rooftop to roughhouse with her three brothers, writing poems to impress her strict, disapproving father, and sneaking out to flirt with a teenage paramour over café glacé. During the summer of 1950, Forugh's passion for poetry takes flight - and tradition seeks to clip her wings.
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I really wanted to love this book, but...
- By Susan on 06-25-18
By: Jasmin Darznik
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An American Immigrant
- A Novel
- By: Johanna Rojas Vann
- Narrated by: Allison Strong
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A Colombian American journalist tries to save her career by taking an assignment somewhere she never thought she’d go—Colombia—in this heartwarming debut novel about rediscovering our family stories.
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Boring!
- By BecGie on 03-21-25
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Washington Black
- A Novel
- By: Esi Edugyan
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human.
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Now what do I do?
- By Mary L. Doyle on 10-04-18
By: Esi Edugyan
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Family Meal
- A Novel
- By: Bryan Washington
- Narrated by: André Santana, Bryan Washington, Jake Choi
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets—a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time— the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.
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Fantastic.
- By Quinn on 10-11-23
By: Bryan Washington
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Girl at War
- A Novel
- By: Sara Novic
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Zagreb, 1991. Ana Jurić is a carefree 10-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia's capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana's idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana's sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world.
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A perfectly timed departure from the predictable template.
- By Sara on 06-03-15
By: Sara Novic
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The Wildest Sun
- A Novel
- By: Asha Lemmie
- Narrated by: Imani Jade Powers
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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When tragedy forces Delphine Auber, an aspiring writer on the cusp of adulthood, from her home in postwar Paris, she seizes the opportunity to embark on the journey she's long dreamed of: finding the father she has never known. But her quest—spanning from Paris to New York’s Harlem, to Havana and Key West—is complicated by the fact that she believes him to be famed luminary Ernest Hemingway, a man just as elusive as he is iconic. She desperately yearns for his approval, as both a daughter and a writer, convinced that he holds the key to who she's truly meant to be.
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delightful, quirky story!
- By Redpen on 03-08-24
By: Asha Lemmie
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River Sing Me Home
- By: Eleanor Shearer
- Narrated by: Debra Michaels, Eleonor Shearer
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces the king has decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the Emancipation Act of 1834 will come into effect. The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. They must work for him for another six years. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived. So Rachel runs.
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Good debut.. with a few quarrels in my opinion
- By Alize on 07-24-23
By: Eleanor Shearer
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Day One
- A Novel
- By: Abigail Dean
- Narrated by: Emma Atkins, Nigel Pilkington, Sarah Durham
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A village hall, a primary school play, a beautiful Lake District town in England. Into this idyllic scene steps a lone gunman whose actions set off a train of events that will have devastating consequences for the close-knit community of Stonesmere.
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A bit of a slog
- By Suzanna on 02-17-25
By: Abigail Dean
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Sex, Lies and Sensibility
- By: Nikki Payne
- Narrated by: Kacie Rogers, Phil Ava, Nikki Payne
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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There’s never a good time to learn you are your father’s secret child—especially not at the reading of his will. With their father’s affairs laid bare and Nora’s sensible reputation in tatters due to a viral video scandal, she and her free-spirited sister have nothing left but a rustic inn in the middle of nowhere and each other. What’s more, they need to revamp the inn before Labor Day or they lose it all.
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Loved the narrators!
- By Bonnie McGuire on 07-19-24
By: Nikki Payne
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Deacon King Kong
- A Novel
- By: James McBride
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird.
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Masterpiece
- By Linda G McDonough on 05-17-20
By: James McBride
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Hard by a Great Forest
- A Novel
- By: Leo Vardiashvili
- Narrated by: Luke Thompson
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Saba is just a child when he flees the fighting in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in England. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind.
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Evocative and deeply moving
- By 2Rivers on 04-11-24
By: Leo Vardiashvili
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How to Love a Jamaican
- Stories
- By: Alexia Arthurs
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Adenrele Ojo, Dominic Hoffman, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these 11 stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.
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Wha gwaan?!
- By Nik on 03-28-19
By: Alexia Arthurs
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The Other Americans
- A Novel
- By: Laila Lalami
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò, P.J. Ochlan, Adenrele Ojo, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Moor’s Account, here is a timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant—at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.
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Don't bother - there are so many better stories
- By Robin Davis on 10-22-19
By: Laila Lalami
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The Chinese Groove
- A Novel
- By: Kathryn Ma
- Narrated by: James Chen
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father’s grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng’s tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the “Chinese groove,” a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders.
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A delightful surprise
- By R. Glynn on 02-01-23
By: Kathryn Ma
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The Fraud
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
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Very disappointing
- By Happy purchaser on 09-10-23
By: Zadie Smith
What listeners say about American Spy
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- Felicia
- 10-21-20
Engaging tale!
Captivating storytelling! I enjoyed the diverse character portrayals, especially with the different language accents represented.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Patricia Dixie
- 08-03-20
Slow start but ends with a mic drop
I was a little confused in the begin and has to get use to hearing the story being told as a letter being written. After I got over that it was a really good story line. I really want to hear how her story will end. this needs a book 2.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-15-20
Excellent Story and storytelling
I loved this story and it was well narrated by Bahni Turpin! A real classic.
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- Sydney Breuer
- 03-22-22
Disappointed
I wanted to love this book, but ever chapter fell short for me. Not enough suspense and I didn't feel the characters were truly in love. The reader was good, so no complaints there.
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- Charles Singer
- 02-23-19
Where's Waldo
When you find Waldo, maybe you will find the spy story too. Just a story without resolution. Where did those 11 hours go.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Chris Davenport
- 11-04-20
Excellent!
I loved this story that weaves together history, deeply personal reflections, different cultures and political points of view in a magical lyricism.
The narration was also wonderful, never distracting, but rather, drawing me deeper into the story.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Susan
- 01-07-20
Anti climactic, otherwise good
Starts off strong, well read and interesting characters and story. Leaves you hanging at the end, which isn’t my preference.
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- A. Belden
- 06-12-21
wonderful! I really enjoyed this book.
it was not super fast paced, but it was consistent. a very good and interesting listen!
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-21-22
Excellent
I’m home sick as ever and this provided a wonderful escape. Great job!! Thank you
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- Cara
- 05-26-19
Spy-family-romance novel
I really enjoyed this story. It’s part spy novel, part family drama, and part love story all in one.
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