The Bourne Identity

The Bourne Identity is a 1980 spy fiction thriller by Robert Ludlum that tells the story of Jason Bourne, a man with remarkable survival abilities who suffers from retrograde amnesia, and who must seek to discover his true identity. In the process, he must also reason out why several shadowy groups, a professional assassin, and the CIA want him dead. The story takes readers on a suspenseful and action-packed journey into a world of deceptions and conspiracies, offering a compelling psychological portrait of Bourne, and giving them the chance to experience from his point of view the life-or-death decisions he makes as he seeks to piece together the dangerous puzzle of his missing past. It is the first novel of the original Bourne Trilogy, which also includes The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Peter Cannon of Publishers Weekly named The Bourne Identity among the best spy novels of all time, after John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In For The Cold.

The novel was the basis for the scripts of the 1988 television movie of the same name starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith and the 2002 film The Bourne Identity, starring Matt Damon.

Segments Alluded To

 * Finding Jason Bourne