About the Author

John le Carré was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a con man, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on December 12, 2020.

Reviews

“Superb writing, precise portraiture, clever tricks of tradecraft—all Mr. le Carré’s hallmarks are present in this swift, surprising, bittersweet story.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“So topical it arrives with the beeping urgency of a news alert.”
—The Washington Post

“A word about le Carré's prose: Not only does it hold the coiled energy of a much younger writer, it fits the bitter, angry narrator's voice exceptionally well.”
—NPR.org

“Le Carré is one of the best novelists—of any kind—we have.”
—Vanity Fair

“Le Carré remains a master at showing us what spies do, wily spiders to the unsuspecting flies they entrap.”
—Booklist (starred)

“Deeply pleasurable.”
—Vogue

“A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.”
—Kirkus 

“John le Carré is the great master of the spy story. . . . The constant flow of emotion lifts him not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practicing.”
—Financial Times

“One of our great writers of moral ambiguity, a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-man's land.”
—Los Angeles Times

“No other writer has charted—pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers—the public and secret histories of his times.”
—The Guardian (UK)