12 Best Robert Harris Books

An Officer and a Spy retells the Dreyfus affair through Colonel Georges Picquart, newly promoted to French military intelligence. When he realises the evidence against Alfred Dreyfus was faked and the real spy is still active, his determination to speak out puts him in danger.

Conclave is set in the tense days after a pope’s death, as cardinals are sealed inside the Vatican to choose his successor. Dean Jacopo Lomeli must manage rival factions, buried scandals and a late‑arriving outsider as each ballot reshapes the race for the papacy.

Set in a victorious Nazi Germany in 1964, Fatherland follows detective Xavier March as a routine murder inquiry draws him toward a buried secret about the regime’s past. As Hitler’s 75th birthday and a US state visit loom, the investigation turns him from hunter into hunted.

Set in the last days before Vesuvius erupts, Pompeii centers on young engineer Marcus Attilius, tasked with fixing the great Aqua Augusta aqueduct. Investigating a mysterious breakdown, he uncovers corruption, seismic omens and a looming disaster that threatens the towns depending on his water.

Act of Oblivion begins after the restoration of Charles II, when parliament declares the king’s killers traitors. Regicides Edward Whalley and William Goffe flee to Puritan New England, only to be hunted across oceans and forests by relentless royalist official Richard Nayler.

Imperium opens the Cicero trilogy, with his secretary Tiro narrating the rise of an ambitious young lawyer from provincial outsider to Roman power-broker. Courtroom showdowns, backroom deals and dangerous enemies build toward Cicero’s first bid for real power in the brutal politics of the Republic.

Dictator concludes the Cicero trilogy, following his final fifteen years through exile, uneasy return and the rise of Caesar and then Octavian. Tiro’s narrative shows a gifted orator trying to save a collapsing Republic, even as shifting alliances bring Cicero closer to his own destruction.

In The Ghost, a nameless writer is hired to finish the memoirs of a former British prime minister hiding on a wintry American island. As he rewrites the book and probes his predecessor’s death, he uncovers uneasy links between his subject, the CIA and past wars.

In wartime Britain, brilliant but fragile codebreaker Tom Jericho is summoned back to Bletchley Park when the German U‑boats change their Enigma settings. As he races to crack the new cipher, Jericho also searches for a missing former lover who may be a traitor.

Conspirata (published elsewhere as Lustrum) continues Tiro’s account of Cicero, now at the peak of his career as consul of Rome. Facing the Catiline conspiracy, scheming rivals and restless mobs, Cicero struggles to defend the Republic while every decision makes him new, implacable enemies.

Munich unfolds over four days in September 1938, when Europe teeters on the edge of war. British official Hugh Legat and German diplomat Paul Hartmann—once friends at Oxford, now on opposite sides—reunite at the Munich conference, carrying documents that could expose Hitler and change events.

Precipice is set in the summer of 1914, as Britain edges toward war and Prime Minister H. H. Asquith pours his private anxieties into letters to young socialite Venetia Stanley. When secret documents start leaking, a Scotland Yard detective’s inquiry turns their affair into a security crisis.