About the Author

John le CarrU is the author of many bestselling novels, several of which have achieved the status of modern classic. His works include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Smiley's People; The Little Drummer Girl; A Perfect Spy; The Russia House; and Absolute Friends.

Reviews

Fascinating, important, pithy. Anyone interested in le Carré and his significant contribution to the literature of the 20th and 21st centuries will want to read these engaging meanderings through his life and career.He has plenty to say about Kim Philby, the movie business, fellow spooks and Russian defectors, encounters with the great and good, and his intrepid travels to research his novels
*Guardian*

Vintage le Carré ... [he] remains a magician of plot and counter-plot, a master storyteller
*Observer*

John le Carré is as recognizable a writer as Dickens or Austen
*Financial Times*

When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carré ... they were a journey into the wider world ... These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind
*Aung San Suu Kyi*

No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his times
*Guardian*

A smashing read
*Wall Street Journal*

Offers thrills of recognition as le Carré's archetypes spring to life... The 84-year old novelist discards extended narrative and writes in elegiac fragments with linking harmonies, like the late works of that other German Romantic, Beethoven
*Financial Times*

Exceptionally well-turned and enjoyable
*Evening Standard*

Grippingly written, it is revealing in ways the author never intended it to be
*Sunday Telegraph*

Cagey, clever, revealing
*Daily Telegraph*

le Carré is a master of the art... fascinatingly readable
*The Times*

Frank and fascinating
*Daily Express*

The Pigeon Tunnel is a delight... a collection of highly polishes oddments from a life, assembled to entertain and inform...fabulously funny
*Radio Times*

A snapshot of a story that is, truly, as extraordinary as any of his fiction
*Daily Mail*

For me The Pigeon Tunnel just confirms the enigma... extremely humorous... at no point do I feel that I knew one tiny bit more than he wants me to know

He has written an uproarious, darkly poignant and precious book
*New Statesman*

A beautiful book. The great glory of it is it comes close to unlocking the central mystery of le Carré

As enthralling as his fiction
*Woman and Home*

Le Carré is such a good writer . . . Though urbane and detached, there is rage simmering not far below the surface of both le Carré and his new book. But then, nothing, absolutely nothing, is what it seems
*Daily Mail*

A deeply personal and touching account of le Carré's life ... it has undeniable power
*Prospect*

Explosive
*Daily Mail*

le Carré's The Pigeon Tunnel is exquisite

I savoured the gravelly, quietly insistent voice of a master storyteller examining his own life
*The Spectator*

the entertaining recollections of a raconteur
*Telegraph*

Elusive and frank and witty by turns, the spy master gives away just as much of himself as he wants to in The Pigeon Tunnel, tracing the story of his life through his walk-on parts in the history and mythology of the cold war, and the shape-shifting discipline of his imagination
*Guardian Biographies of the Year*