Pico Iyer Picks His Favorite Graham Greene Novels

The Book Beast, Jan 12, 2012 

From The Quiet American to The End of the Affair, writer Pico Iyer picks his four essential novels by Graham Greene, about whom he has just written a memoir: The Man Within My Head.

The Quiet American

If you want to know what happened recently in Iraq—and what’s going to happen this year in Afghanistan—read Greene’s most essential novel, from 1955. On the surface, it’s a political parable about the British Empire on the wane, a dangerously idealistic new American Empire on the move, and the Vietnam that shimmers between them in the 1950s. Deep down, it’s also a rendingly private story about three people in love, wavering between realism and romance.

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