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...

“… 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...

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...