SIX POLITICAL PAGE-TURNERS TO PAIR WITH SEASON 3 OF NETFLIX'S 'THE DIPLOMAT'
- Brittanee Black
- Oct 15
- 4 min read
The new season of Netflix’s The Diplomat drops today, and let’s be honest, few shows make geopolitics this sexy. Between crisis management, simmering power plays, and one complicated marriage, it’s the kind of prestige drama that leaves you craving more: more secrets, more strategy, more people saying devastating things in perfect blazers.
If you finish an episode and immediately want to stay in that world of diplomacy, dysfunction, and high-stakes manipulation, these six books are your next assignment. Each one is steeped in ambition, intrigue, and the kind of moral grayness that The Diplomat only begins to flirt with.
Set in the final years of the Cold War, American Spy follows Marie Mitchell, a brilliant Black FBI agent tasked with infiltrating the circle of Thomas Sankara—the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso. She’s often underestimated and constantly aware that the system she works for wasn’t built to protect her. As her mission blurs the lines between duty and desire, Wilkinson crafts a taut, emotionally layered thriller about race, loyalty, and the personal cost of serving a country that doesn’t always serve you back.
Wilkinson’s novel is part spy thriller, part character study and completely addictive. Like The Diplomat, it’s about the impossible choices women make when loyalty, love, and justice refuse to align. If The Diplomat is about the tightrope between diplomacy and duplicity, American Spy lives on that wire.
If The Diplomat is a sleek martini, The Bandit Queens is a spicy cocktail. It's a darkly funny feminist thriller set in rural India following Geeta—a woman accused of murdering her husband—who becomes an accidental legend in her village when other women start asking her to help with their own “husband problems.” What unfolds is equal parts biting satire and cathartic rebellion.
Shroff skewers patriarchy and bureaucracy with sharp wit, proving that sometimes the most radical political act is refusing to stay quiet. Like The Diplomat, it’s about power—who has it, who wants it, and what happens when women stop asking permission.
Adichie’s sweeping masterpiece captures the Nigerian-Biafran War through intersecting perspectives—a houseboy, a professor, his lover, and her twin sister—each caught between idealism and survival. It’s a novel about politics, yes, but it's also about intimacy, how revolutions fracture families, how love persists through devastation, and how history always feels personal when it’s your life being rewritten.
If The Diplomat is about what we risk to maintain peace, Half of a Yellow Sun asks what we lose when peace fails. If The Diplomat shows diplomacy in theory, Half of a Yellow Sun shows what happens when diplomacy fails.
Set in a Caribbean-inspired world under colonial rule, this fantasy novel follows Sigourney Rose, a free Black woman who wields her psychic gift to claw her way into the ruling class that enslaved her family. She tells herself she’s there to seek justice, but revenge has a way of becoming its own form of tyranny. Callender’s lush, vengeful world is filled with backroom power plays, political maneuvering, and questions about who gets to write history—all of which make it feel eerily aligned with The Diplomat, just with more blood and magic.
Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel opens with one of the best first lines in modern fiction: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” It follows a double agent embedded in the South Vietnamese army who flees to America after the war—only to keep spying for the North. What begins as a political thriller unfurls into a biting, funny, and devastating meditation on identity, ideology, and what it means to live in exile.
This is a masterwork that blends espionage, political satire, and immigrant identity all while Nguyen dismantles the myth of American moral authority with surgical precision. Like The Diplomat, it’s a story about people trying to do good inside systems built to obscure what “good” even means.
On its surface, Bennett’s novel is about twin sisters who choose radically different lives—one passing as white, the other staying in their Black southern community. But underneath, it’s about the performance of identity and the politics of perception.
While it’s not a political thriller in the traditional sense, The Vanishing Half examines identity as strategy—the politics of race, reinvention, and the negotiations we make with the world to be believed, to be safe, and to be loved. Much like The Diplomat, it’s obsessed with façades—the images we build to survive, and what it costs to maintain them.
Whether it’s espionage in the Cold War, colonial power games, or domestic politics disguised as everyday life, these novels prove what The Diplomat reminds us: every relationship—political, romantic, or otherwise—is just another negotiation of power.
Which books are you adding to your list?
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