Below is the complete list of Nick Harkaway books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Titanium Noir Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Publication Order of Seven Demons Books
as Aidan Truhen
Publication Order of Doctor Who: Time Trips Books
Publication Order of George Smiley Books
Publication Order of Solaris Rising Anthology Books
About Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkaway is the principal pen name of British novelist Nicholas Cornwell, whose fiction combines science fiction, espionage, crime, political satire, speculative technology, and exuberant adventure. Born in Cornwall in 1972, he is the son of David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, and Jane Cornwell. He moved to London during childhood, studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked in the film industry before becoming a full-time author. Although his family connection to one of Britain’s most influential spy novelists has become increasingly relevant to his later career, Harkaway first established a markedly different literary identity through expansive, genre-crossing novels.
His debut, The Gone-Away World, was published in 2008. Set after a catastrophic weapon has damaged reality itself, the novel combines post-apocalyptic science fiction with martial arts, corporate absurdity, friendship, warfare, and philosophical questions about identity. Its large scale, comic energy, and sudden structural reversals introduced qualities that would remain characteristic of Harkaway’s work: elaborate world-building, playful language, intellectual argument, and an affection for popular storytelling forms used in unexpectedly ambitious ways.
Angelmaker brought together an unassuming clock repairer, an elderly former secret agent, organized crime, and a machine capable of transforming human consciousness. Tigerman shifted to a threatened island territory, where a weary British official forms a bond with a local boy and becomes entangled in violence, environmental danger, and fantasies of comic-book heroism. Both novels use adventure plots to explore responsibility, parenthood, political power, and the stories people construct in order to act courageously.
Harkaway’s most structurally complex novel, Gnomon, is set in a surveillance society where government systems claim to provide security through almost complete access to private thought. An investigation into a woman’s death opens into several nested identities and narratives, forcing the reader to question which consciousness, memory, or reality can be trusted. The novel exemplifies his tendency to combine contemporary technological concerns with formal experimentation and the momentum of a thriller.
His interest in technology also extends to nonfiction. The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World considers how networked technology changes politics, privacy, citizenship, relationships, and individual agency. Rather than treating the digital world as separate from ordinary life, Harkaway examines it as an environment shaped by human choices and therefore open to human responsibility.
He has published two darkly comic crime thrillers under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen. Beginning with The Price You Pay, these books follow the aggressively resourceful Jack Price through a world of criminals, assassins, and escalating retaliation. Their violent humor and confrontational narrative voice distinguish them from the more expansive speculative novels issued under the Harkaway name.
With Titanium Noir, Harkaway fused private-eye fiction with science fiction through Cal Sounder, a detective investigating crimes involving genetically enhanced elites known as Titans. Sleeper Beach continued Sounder’s story, making it one of the few formal series within a bibliography otherwise composed largely of independent novels.
Harkaway entered his father’s fictional world with Karla’s Choice, an authorized continuation of the George Smiley novels set between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Writing within le Carré’s established universe required a more restrained register than Harkaway’s earlier work while still allowing him to develop new characters and Cold War tensions. A second Smiley continuation, The Taper Man, is scheduled for publication in November 2026.
His bibliography is best understood as several distinct strands: ambitious speculative stand-alones, the Aidan Truhen crime novels, the Cal Sounder series, nonfiction about digital culture, and the newer George Smiley continuations. Across them, Harkaway repeatedly examines power, identity, technology, loyalty, and the possibility of moral action inside systems designed to limit individual choice.