Most Popular Books by David Ignatius

Presents the story of an idealistic United States Central Intelligence Agency spy who is ordered to penetrate the Palestine Liberation Organization and recruit a high-level operative.

What''s the worst mistake a journalist could make? Acclaimed novelist and award-winning journalist David Ignatius has written an authentic news thriller about a reporter who dances too closely with his sources in the CIA.

The status of the United States as a world power, and the nature of power itself, are at a historic turning point, a time when the nation''s decisions could determine how long it remains a superpower. It is essential that we understand and adapt to the new

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of the most highly regarded writers in the capital, an influential journalist and acclaimed novelist with a keen eye for the subtleties of power and politics. In The Sun King, Ignatius has written a love story for our time, a spellbinding portrait of the collision of ambition and sexual desire. Sandy Galvin is a billionaire with a rare talent for taking risks and making people happy. Galvin arrives in a Washington suffering under a cloud of righteous misery and proceeds to turn the place upside down. He buys the city''s most powerful newspaper, The Washington Sun and Tribune, and wields it like a sword, but in his path stands his old Harvard flame, Candace Ridgway, a beautiful and icy journalist known to her colleagues as the Mistress of Fact. Their fateful encounter, tangled in the mysteries of their past, is narrated by David Cantor, an acid-tongued reporter and Jerry Springer devotee who is drawn inexorably into the Sun King''s orbit and is transformed by this unpredictable man. In this wise and poignant novel, love is the final frontier for a generation of baby boomers at midlife—still young enough to reach for their dreams but old enough to glimpse the prospect of loss. The Sun King can light up a room, but can he melt the worldly bonds that constrain the Mistress of Fact? In The Sun King, David Ignatius proves with perceptive wit and haunting power that the phrase "Washington love story" isn''t an oxymoron.

Emerging from a tour of duty in Iraq with a badly injured leg, CIA soldier Roger Ferris takes on a mission to infiltrate the network of a master terrorist and bases his plan on a British intelligence operation from World War II.

"You emerge from its pages as if from a top-level security briefing—confident that you have been let in on the deepest secrets." —Washington Post Someone in Pakistan is killing the members of a new CIA unit trying to buy peace with America’s enemies. It falls to Sophie Marx, a young officer with a big chip on her shoulder, to figure out who’s doing the killing and why. Unfortunately for Sophie, nothing is quite what it seems. This is a theater of violence and revenge, in which the last act is one that Sophie could not have imagined.

By the author of the bestselling "Body of Lies" comes a novel that takes the reader inside the most volatile secret of the 21st century: the Iranian nuclear program.

A New York Times Bestseller. "If you think cybercrime and potential worldwide banking meltdown is a fiction, read this sensational thriller."—Bob Woodward, Politico Graham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents'' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it''s drawn, The Director is a maze of double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones—and nothing can be trusted.

When rising-star reporter Eric Truell accepts information from a maverick CIA agent, he becomes enmeshed in an international trade war in which even his own newspaper may be an unsuspecting participant. When Eric''s sources tell him there is a spy inside the newsroom, he is tempted to cross a dangerous professional line and risk his career possibly even his life to find the truth."

“A riveting imagined world, so real in fact that one always wonders if it is imagined at all.” —Scott Turow Made restless by the tightening restrictions of CIA bureaucracy, agent Alan Taylor oversteps moral and legal bounds in a top-secret mission to destabilize the Soviet Union. His new recruit—the beautiful Anna Barnes, who struggles with complex feelings for Taylor—receives a deeper education than she signed up for in David Ignatius’s trademark world of shifting international and domestic pressures, hidden loyalties, and secret agendas.

"Sizzling…engrossing all the way." —Los Angeles Times Book Review Hit men stalk computer analyst Lina Alwen and financial investigator Sam Hoffman in pursuit of the knowledge the pair may have regarding a late Iraqi dictator’s billions. From London to Switzerland, and from Baghdad to the mysterious corners of the just-budding Internet, this spy thriller covers the map to uncover a world of corruption.

" The Quantum Spy takes us to a whole new level of intrigue and espionage. It''s also unbelievably timely. In short: David Ignatius knows his stuff." —Wolf Blitzer A hyper-fast quantum computer is the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb; whoever possesses one will be able to shred any encryption and break any code in existence. The question is: who will build one first, the U.S. or China? In this gripping thriller, U.S. quantum research labs are compromised by a suspected Chinese informant, inciting a mole hunt of history-altering proportions. CIA officer Harris Chang leads the charge, pursuing his target from Singapore to Mexico and beyond. Do the leaks expose real secrets, or are they false trails meant to deceive the Chinese? The answer forces Chang to question everything he thought he knew about loyalty, morality, and the primacy of truth.

“A meaty, slow-burning spy thriller that combines geopolitics with a primer on celestial mechanics.” —Steven Poole, Wall Street Journal A subtle and masterful novel from a prescient voice on the cutting edge of spy literature. David Ignatius is known for his uncanny ability, in novel after novel, to predict the next great national security headline. In Phantom Orbit, he presents a story both searing and topical, with stakes as far-reaching as outer space. It follows Ivan Volkov, a Russian student in Beijing, who discovers an unsolved puzzle in the writings of the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. He takes the puzzle to a senior scientist in the Chinese space program and declares his intention to solve it. Volkov returns to Moscow and continues his secret work. The puzzle holds untold consequences for space warfare. The years pass, and they are not kind to Volkov. After the loss of his son, a prosecutor who’d been too tough on corruption, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Volkov makes the fraught decision to contact the CIA. He writes: Satellites are your enemies, especially your own. . . . Hidden codes can make time stop and turn north into south. . . . If you are smart, you will find me. With this timely novel, Ignatius addresses our moment of renewed interest in space exploration amid geopolitical tumult. Phantom Orbit brims with the author’s vital insights and casts Volkov as the man who, at the risk of his life, may be able to stop the Doomsday clock.

"Tension, suspense, betrayal, and revenge.... David Ignatius is the best in the world at this stuff." —Lee Child In this latest novel from the "dean of international intrigue" (Brad Thor) and New York Times best-selling author David Ignatius, CIA operations officer Michael Dunne is tasked with infiltrating an Italian news organization that smells like a front for an enemy intelligence service. Headed by an American journalist, the self-styled bandits run a cyber operation unlike anything the CIA has seen before. Fast, slick, and indiscriminate, the group steals secrets from everywhere and anyone, and exploits them in ways the CIA can neither understand nor stop. Dunne knows it''s illegal to run a covert op on an American citizen or journalist, but he has never refused an assignment and his boss has assured his protection. Soon after Dunne infiltrates the organization, however, his cover disintegrates. When news of the operation breaks and someone leaks that Dunne had an extramarital affair while on the job, the CIA leaves him to take the fall. Now a year later, fresh out of jail, Dunne sets out to hunt down and take vengeance on the people who destroyed his life.