This impressive doorstopper of a book is like a family historical saga, except that the family is the American intelligence community. It has all the appropriate characters and tracks them over 40 years: a rogue uncle, the Sorcerer, a heavy-drinking chief of the Berlin office in the early Cold War days; a dashing hero, Jack McAuliffe, who ages gracefully and never loses his edge; a dastardly turncoat, who for the sake of the reader will not be identified here, but who dies nobly; a dark genius, the real-life James Jesus Angleton, who after the disclosure that an old buddy, British spy Kim Philby, had been a Russian agent all along, became a model of paranoia; a Russian exchange student who starts out with our heroes at Yale but then works for "the other side"; and endless assorted ladyfolk, wives, girlfriends and gutsy daughters who are not portrayed with anything like the gritty relish of the men. Littell, an old hand at the genre (he wrote the classic The Defection of A.J. Lewinter) keeps it all moving well, and there are convincing set pieces: the fall of Budapest, the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and an eerily prescient episode in Afghanistan, in which a character obviously modeled on Osama bin Laden appears, accompanied by a sidekick whose duty is to slay him instantly if his capture by the West seems imminent. It's gung-ho, hard-drinking, table-turning fun, even if a little old-fashioned now that we have so many other problems to worry about than the Russians but it brings back vividly a time when they seemed a real threat. There are some breathtaking real-life moments with the Kennedy brothers, and with a bumbling Reagan, and with Vladimir Putin, now the leader of Russia, who is here given a background that is extremely shady. (Apr.)Forecast: The Afghanistan element will lend itself to handselling, but that will be only icing on the cake of Overlook's full-tilt publicity campaign, which will include national ad/promo, a TV/radio satellite tour and an author tour. Along with Littell's reputation among critics and spy-lit cognescenti, it should all add up to a breakout book with serious bestseller potential. And Overlook's planned reprinting in hardcover of all of Littell's work, beginning with The Defection of A.J. Lewinter, should keep Littell's name in readers' minds for years to come. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Here's a real preview. This thriller isn't coming out until April, but the publisher is already plugging it like mad. Littell is a former Newsweek journalist and the author of many respected spy thrillers who has never quite broken out. Overlook president Peter Mayer went after him to write a thriller embracing the entire history of the Cold War, and here it is. Rights have been sold to six countries, and the book is being promoted with the painfully relevant tag line "the spies are always with us."Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

If le Carre is the Joyce of spy novelists, Littell is the Dickens. Le Carre's focus has always been internal--spying as a metaphorical search for identity. Littell, on the other hand, wants to represent the entire espionage landscape on his canvas, the social and political aspects as well as the psychological. He's done that superbly, from The Defection of A. J. Lewinter (1973) through Walking Back the Cat (1997), but never in as much detail as in this nearly 1,000-page magnum opus, the spy novel as epic. Seamlessly mixing real events and real people with the story of four fictional spies, Littell presents the history of the CIA, from postwar Berlin to the present. As we follow the intersecting careers of three Company agents and one KGB operative, we see the major events and personalities of the cold war from the inside: Kim Philby, the Hungarian revolution, the Bay of Pigs, Russia versus Afghanistan, the fall of the Soviet Union. As Littell tells it, the story of the cold war is an Alice in Wonderland-like saga of multiple U.S. fiascoes leading inexplicably to a most peculiar victory. Littell, like le Carre, understands the slippery moral slope on which all covert activity rests, but he retains a clear respect for the cunning and bravery of the men and women who live in the shadow world. Has America's post-cold war «softness» created a vulnerability to terrorism, or has the spy's «wilderness of mirrors» undermined our common humanity? Littell finds evidence for both positions in an utterly captivating novel that is as disturbing as it is awash in every kind of ambiguity. Bill Ott. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.