Books like Cryptonomicon
Two timelines converge: World War II codebreakers, among them a mathematician and a Marine, and a 1990s generation of hackers building a data haven in Southeast Asia, around a buried hoard of gold and the birth of the information age.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Cryptonomicon
The Rose Code
A debutante, an East End girl and a shy puzzle-solver become codebreakers at Bletchley Park, then reunite on the eve of the 1947 royal wedding to unmask the traitor among them.
The Gold Bug Variations
In 1957 a young geneticist tries to crack the genetic code, and in the 1980s a librarian and an art historian piece together his story, in a novel built on Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Purity
A young woman buried in student debt takes an internship with a charismatic German leaker in Bolivia to find the father she never knew, and the novel spirals back through his past and her mother's.
Quicksilver
In 1713 the mysterious Enoch Root finds Daniel Waterhouse, an ageing natural philosopher, in Boston and summons him back to London to settle the feud between Newton and Leibniz, and the story returns to Daniel's youth among the founders of the Royal Society.
The Bee Sting
The Barnes family of a small Irish town is coming apart: the father's car dealership is failing after the 2008 crash, the mother watches the money and the marriage slip away, and their teenage daughter and young son each struggle in secret.
Gravity's Rainbow
A massive, hallucinatory novel tracking a V-2 rocket across wartime Europe, connecting paranoia, entropy, Pavlovian conditioning, and the death drive of Western civilisation.
Dog Years
The friendship of Walter Matern and Eddi Amsel, two boys from a village near Danzig, from the 1920s through the Nazi years and after, told by three narrators and shadowed by a line of black dogs.
Mercury Pictures Presents
Maria Lagana, who fled Mussolini's Italy as a girl, works her way up at a low-budget Hollywood studio during the Second World War, where everyone is hiding something and the government wants propaganda.
The Family Moskat
The wealthy Moskat family of Warsaw and its old patriarch Meshulam, from the turn of the century to the German bombardment of 1939.
Tree of Smoke
A CIA operative, a missionary, and a Vietnamese double agent move through the fog of the Vietnam War, where no one's motives are what they seem.
Bleeding Edge
A fraud investigator in post-9/11 New York discovers that the tech startup she's examining may be connected to something far more dangerous than financial crime.
Still Life
In the summer of 1944, among the ruins of Tuscany, Ulysses Temper, a young British soldier, meets Evelyn Skinner, an English art historian in her sixties who has come to rescue paintings, and the meeting shapes the next forty years of his life.