In 2012, de Bellaigue's book about Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mossadegh, Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup, was published.[4][5] It won the Bronze Washington Institute Book Prize.[6]
De Bellaigue's 2009 book Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town is based largely on research he conducted in Varto, a small town in southeastern Turkey.[7] The book begins with a story of de Bellaigue's essay published in the New York Review of Books, whose allusion to the Armenian genocide prompted a letter from the Harvard Professor James R. Russell accusing de Bellaigue of promoting denialist views, as well as criticism from the magazine's editor Robert Silvers.[7][8][9]
Dismayed to realize that he had gotten his information on these events only from Turkish and pro-Turkish writers, de Bellaigue set out to find out the truth through his own research.[7][8] In his book de Bellaigue criticizes the Turkish historians who, he argues, have whitewashed the history surrounding the Armenian Genocide, and also "worries that 'a genocide fixation' has blinded both sides to all shades of gray".[7]
In a New York Times review, Dwight Garner calls the book "murky and uneven" and "as much memoir as proper history".[7] In another New York Times review, Joseph O'Neill writes that de Bellaigue investigates the situation on the ground "brilliantly and evenhandedly (if occasionally emotively). Analytically, however, he can be abrupt."[10] Reviewing Rebel Land in The Telegraph, Sameer Rahim called it "a fascinating book".[11]
The Struggle for Iran (2007). New York: New York Review of Books. ISBN9781590172384
Rebel Land: Among Turkey's Forgotten People (2009). New York: The Penguin Press. ISBN978-1594202520
Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup (2012). New York: Harper. ISBN978-0061844706
The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times (2017). New York: Liveright Publishing. ISBN9780871403735
ReTargeting Iran (City Lights Publishers, 2020) (Written by David Barsamian, includes an interview with Christopher de Bellaigue). San Francisco: City Lights Books. ISBN9780872868045
The Lion House: The Coming of a King (2022). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN9780374279189[12]
de Bellaigue, Christopher, "A World Off the Hinges" (review of Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Knopf, 2023, 695 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no. 18 (23 November 2023), pp. 40–42. De Bellaigue writes: "Like the Maya and the Akkadians we have learned that a broken environment aggravates political and economic dysfunction and that the inverse is also true. Like the Qing we rue the deterioration of our soils. But the lesson is never learned. [...] Denialism [...] is one of the most fundamental of human traits and helps explain our current inability to come up with a response commensurate with the perils we face." (p. 41.)
^"Diary". London Review of Books. 5 July 2001. Retrieved 27 August 2010.
^Patriot of Persia by Christopher de Bellaigue – Review by James Buchan, The Guardian, 2 March 2012.
^The New York Review of Books, 16 August 2012, "A Crass and Consequential Error," reviewing the book "Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup" by Christopher de Bellaigue.