The Peacock and the Sparrow

Berry, a former CIA operations officer, sets her debut inside the 2011 Bahraini uprising, following Shane Collins, a burned-out case officer on his last posting who is meant to be tracking Iranian influence on the protest movement but instead drifts into an affair with an artist connected to the opposition. Reviewers repeatedly reached for le Carré and Graham Greene as reference points, less for imitation than for a shared willingness to treat espionage as a moral swamp rather than a plot device — critics praised Berry's insider specificity about tradecraft and Gulf politics as the novel's load-bearing asset. The love story running through the political plot divided opinion less than the ending, which multiple reviewers flagged as the point where the novel's cynicism about American intelligence work resolves into its bleakest, most committed statement.