Nemesis
I lived in a slum in Rio to write this. I wanted to find the real story behind one of the city’s most notorious drug traffickers who agreed to talk to me at length in his prison cell. I also spoke to the police officers who investigated and arrested him as well as friends, family and enemies. I tried to write Nemesis like a novel to make it as gripping as possible, but readers will also learn much about how Brazil, one of my favourite countries, really works.
Buy Nemesis from Amazon
Buy Nemesis from AmazonBreaking Bad meets City of God - Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah
Dark Market
This is the true story of Dark Market – a Facebook for criminals - where they linked up, shared ideas, sold credit cards and off-the-shelf malware. In the process of writing Dark Market, I got to know several of the criminal hackers involved, as well as the FBI agent who infiltrated the group over a two-year period. The book reveals much about the exploding culture of cyber crime. But I promise it’s not overly technical – it’s about people and the weird, fascinating but frightening world that is now forming in the dark recesses of cyberspace.
An eminently readable, witty narrative that sustains suspense until the very last pages - Wall Street Journal
McMafia
The idea for this book came to me in the late 90s after a decade of working in Eastern Europe and the Balkans covering the fall of communism and the wars in Yugoslavia. I had noticed that the new elite of politicians and business people had links to some very unsavoury characters. As the planned economy collapsed and gave way to the free market, new organised crime groups exploited the chaos. And so I started a three-year journey, travelling the world and talking to criminals…
Anyone with even the smallest interest in how the world really works should read this book - GQ
The Balkans
When I was covering the wars in Yugoslavia, I realised that a number of my journalist colleagues were coming up with pat explanations about ancient hatreds. There was a lot of ignorance and too many glib answers about the history of the region. As no single volume of modern history existed, I decided to write one. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to research. It took me four years of full-time study and writing but it’s now a standard history course book for universities all over the world and I’m proud of it.
Glenny tackles Balkan history in the manner of a CNN reporter working behind history's lines - all the way from the revolts of Serbia and Greece in the 1800s to the present - New York Times
The Fall of Yugoslavia
I wrote this on the road as a reporter in the early 90s, in hotel rooms from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik and Belgrade. I was working as the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent covering the wars and struggling to understand why a country that I knew and loved had descended into this terrible bloodbath.
Misha Glenny’s deeply disturbing book is, to my mind, essential reading for anyone trying to understand, or even just follow, events in what was once Yugoslavia- Evening Standard
The Rebirth of History
This is about the revolutions in Eastern Europe that led to the end of communism. While the revolutions themselves were a moment of great hope, from everything I was seeing, I felt it was premature to open the champagne. The title is a response to the American academic Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a well-publicised book predicting that 1989 was the end of history and that we would all live happily ever after in a free market liberal democracy. It didn’t quite work out that way…