George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess ‘the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’. It is 1962: the height of the Cold War and only months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Alec Leamas is a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer whose East Berlin network is in tatters. His agents are either...

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess ‘the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’. When a Russian émigré is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, Smiley is called out of retirement to exorcise some Cold War ghosts from his clandestine past. What follows is Smiley the human being at his most vulnerable and Smiley th...

This novel from lauded and bestselling author John le Carré follows Barley Blair, a British publisher, who finds himself unexpectedly entangled in Cold War espionage.

“… le Carré shows his customary mastery in the details—from Jonathan's self-lacerating momentum to the intricacies of interagency turf wars—and reveals once again why nobody writes espionage fiction with his kind of authority.” — Kirkus ReviewsIn the shadowy recesses of Whitehall and Washington, an unholy alliance operates between the intelligence community and the secret arms trade. After a series of events in Cairo that culminate in the tragic death of a...

“a splendid book… [le Carré] is a perfect spy novelist.” — The New York TimesThe most autobiographical of John le Carré’s works, A Perfect Spy follows two narratives: the manhunt for the double agent Magnus Pym, and the makings of the man in question—told in his own words.Referred to as le Carré’s best work and one of the best English novels of the 20th century by the likes of Philip Pullman and Philip Roth, this mesmerizing drama captures...

As usual, le Carré (Our Kind of Traitor) tells a great story in sterling prose —Publishers WeeklyIn 2008, a covert counter-terror operation codenamed Wildlife is mounted on the Rock of Gibraltar. This one is right off the books: the target codenamed PUNTER; the English boys on land, the American mercenaries by sea; Kit Probyn, Foreign Office upright veteran with a safe pair of hands and no previous experience of the dark arts, to be the M...