John le Carré

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues...

In the era of perestroika and glasnost in the USSR, a manuscript is meant to be delivered to one Bartholomew Barley Blair, a British publisher known for his eccentricity. The manuscript, penned by Russian scientist Yakov Savelyev, contains critical information detailing the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities and the state of their missile program. Except, it doesn't reach Barley. Instead, after exchanging hands several times, it ends up in the hands...

A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears...

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets...

In years past, the Circus oversaw political matters while their counterpart, the Department, dealt with intelligence more military in nature. These days, however, the Circus' influence looms large, while the Department is relegated to the doldrums of bureaucracy and red tape. With the Cold War at a fever pitch, though, a potential assignment is only ever one defector-turned-informant away. Alerted to the possibility of missile activity from the Soviets...

After an unremarkable interview, Circus agent George Smiley determines the subject of a standard security check-a civil servant in the Foreign Office named Samuel Fennan-poses no threat, nor presents any reason for suspicion of espionage. Hours later, Samuel Fennan is found dead by suicide. Suddenly finding himself under intense scrutiny, Smiley realizes the Circus intends to blame him for Fennan's death. Rather than remain idle, Smiley begins his...

"Splendid, original… le Carré shows how endowed he is with the gift of storytelling."-The Times (UK) Aldo Cassidy is the naive and sentimental lover. A successful, judicious man, he is wrenched away from the ordered certainties of his life by a sudden encounter with Shamus, a wild, beguiling artist and Helen, his alluring and dazzling wife. Cassidy, plunged into a whirlpool of spontaneity and hedonism, becomes a man both bewildered and agonized...

"Not a page of this book is without intelligence and grace." -The New York Times The mole has been purged from the Circus, and George Smiley, newly-made chief of the agency, has both rebuilding and revenge in his sights. To fully eradicate the threat, Smiley must trace back the treachery to its very roots. When his investigation leads him to Hong Kong-and what appears to be a dead end-Smiley enlists Jerry Westerby, an international sports journalist...

"The undisputed master returns with a riveting new book--his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years. Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations...