American Spy (2019) is one of the most celebrated debut spy novels of the twenty-first century, and Lauren Wilkinson signed first editions are already attracting serious collector interest. An Edgar Award nominee, Obama summer reading list selection, and New York Times notable book, it brought an entirely new perspective to the genre and drew comparisons to the finest literary espionage writers working today. First editions from a debut of this critical stature, by an author still early in her career, represent exactly the kind of early-stage acquisition that collectors look back on. A collector’s name worth knowing well.
Signed By Author is an eBay affiliate. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases.
About Lauren Wilkinson
Lauren Wilkinson grew up in New York City and studied fiction and literary translation at Columbia University, where she later taught writing alongside the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer’s Fellow, and received support from the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program before her debut novel announced her as one of the most original voices to enter the spy fiction genre in a generation.
That debut, American Spy, published by Random House in 2019, is the novel that made her name. It follows Marie Mitchell, a Black FBI agent recruited by the CIA in 1986 to work undercover in Burkina Faso, tasked with getting close to Thomas Sankara, the charismatic and leftist president whose government the United States was working to destabilise. Sankara was a real historical figure, and Wilkinson’s decision to anchor her fiction in actual events gave the novel an unsettling moral charge that straightforward espionage fiction rarely achieves. Marie is not simply an operative navigating a mission; she is a Black woman serving a country that has consistently treated her as a second-class citizen, and the tension between duty, identity, and conscience drives the book from first page to last.
The reception was remarkable for a debut. American Spy was a Washington Post bestseller, selected for Barack Obama’s 2019 summer reading list, chosen by the New York Times as one of its 100 Notable Books of the year, and shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was nominated for the NAACP Image Award, the Anthony Award, and the Edgar Award. Critics reached for serious comparisons: Time noted that Wilkinson’s reckoning with the postwar world order earned the comparisons to le Carré she was already receiving, while NPR called it both an expertly written spy thriller and a deeply intelligent literary novel. The book sits squarely within spy novels, but it is also doing something more: bringing a perspective on the Cold War – that of a woman of colour navigating a white male institution – that the genre had almost entirely ignored until she arrived.
Wilkinson has since worked as a screenwriter for television, with credits including Citadel, Star Trek: Discovery, and Class of ’09, a range that speaks to how readily her storytelling instincts translate across forms. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Believer, and the New York Times, among other publications. A second novel has been anticipated by readers and critics since American Spy‘s publication; when it arrives, the first edition of her debut will only look more significant in retrospect.
Illustration of Lauren Wilkinson based on an original photograph by Niqui Carter found on lauren-wilkinson.com. (Image used for editorial purposes; no endorsement by author or photographer implied.)