John Le Carre

See books by this author on Amazon

BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR


Title: Single And Single: Description:
Those who have followed le Carré's remarkable progress as writer (from the lean and brilliantly-plotted The Spy Who Came in from the Cold onwards) will be aware that the end of the Cold War gave the author no pause at all; while other espionage writers were floundering around for a subject, le Carré was able to deal with the dangerous realities of the modern world in precisely the same compulsive way he had always done. If some of the recent novels have, nevertheless, not had quite the elegant and commanding power of his best work, it's refreshing to welcome this new book as one of his most assured in years. A corporate lawyer is brutally killed on a hillside in Turkey, and the reader is transported into a disparate but compelling series of events, taking us from a Devon seaside resort through the lethal world of the Russian Mafiosi to a tense climax in the High Caucasus. Of course, for le Carré character is every bit as important as plot: his protagonist, concealing his past security work by working as a children's magician, has failings as a father (which match the problems he had with his own father). In terms of the narrative, as so often before, the author has us at his command from the very first page.--Barry Forshaw

Title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Description:
poor condition but readable

Title: The Russia House: Description:
It is the third summer of perestroika. Barley Blair, London publisher, is sent a manuscript from Moscow. It contains technical information of overwhelming importance. But is it genuine? Is the author genuine? A plant? A madman? Blair, jazz-loving, drink marinated, dishevelled, is hardly to the taste of the spymasters, yet he has to be used - sent to the Soviet Union to make contact.

Title: The Secret Pilgrim: Description:
Le Carre sprinkles a host of splendid new characters among the old knights of his own writing past: George Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Bill Haydon, and Ned of the Russia House among many others - each has his hour and takes his final bow in this pageant of the ever-changing, never-ending secret world, which in Le Carre's hands is merely the inmost room of our overt lives.

Title: The Naive And Sentimental Lover (coronet Books): Description:
The author wrote A tale about the friendship between a businessman and a couple he meets one day when looking for a house in the country. The couple are more than eccentric and have a strong influence on Aldo Cassidy. "The Spy who Came in from the Cold" and "A Perfect Spy".

Title: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (coronet Books): Description:
Thriller

Title: The Night Manager: Description:
Thriller

Title: The Russia House: Description:
love story and spy story combined

Title: Smiley Versus Karla: Description:
The ultimate Cold War duel is fought out in this trilogy. About the Author John le Carre was born in 1931. He attended the universities of Bern and Oxford and later taught at Eton. He spent five years in the British Foreign Service. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Title: The Constant Gardener: Description:
Frightening, heartbreaking and exquisitely calibrated, "The Constant Gardener" is a profoundly moving story of a man ennobled by his wife's tragic murder, and a magnificent exploration of the dark side of unbridled capitalism. Le Carre's record-breaking 500,000 copy international bestseller now comes to the big screen. Directed by critically acclaimed Fernando Meirelles ("City of God"), with an all-star cast featuring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Pete Postlethwaite and Bill Nighy, and shot on location in Berlin, Kenya and the UK, "The Constant Gardener" will be the film tie-in of the year. From the Publisher The filming of THE CONSTANT GARDENER brought together a terrific mix of talent from the West and from Kenya, but conditions on location were harsh. Inspired to help in the most useful way they could, the cast and crew founded the Trust. So far the money from donations has gone to many projects, including a much-needed secondary school in Loiyangalani; toilets, shower blocks and water towers in Kibera. Whilst continuing to build further classrooms for the secondary school, the Trust is also starting a mobile clinic service in Kibera. The Trust is run voluntarily by two members of the crew and one paid part-time project manager on the ground. This means that ninety-five percent of donations received are spent directly on projects chosen after careful discussion between the trustees and the local people who will benefit from them.John le Carré has donated all royalties from this edition of the book to help and the Trust would like to thank him and you for the support. About the Author John le Carré was born in 1931. He attended the universities of Bern and Oxford and later taught at Eton. He spent five years in the British Foreign Service. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Title: The Mission Song: Description:
Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent, twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love-child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese headman's daughter. Educated first at mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu, and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor Brother Michael to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector. Soon a rising star in his profession, he is courted by City corporations, hospitals, law courts, the Immigration services and -- inevitably -- the mushrooming overworld of British Intelligence. He is also courted -- and won -- by the all-white, Surrey-born Penelope, star reporter on one of our great national newspapers, whom with typical impulsiveness he promptly marries. Yet even as the story opens, a contrary and irresistible love is dawning in him. Despatched to a no-name island in the North Sea to attend a top-secret meeting between Western financiers and East Congolese warlords, Salvo is obliged to interpret matters never intended for his re-awoken African conscience.

Title: The Looking Glass War (hodder Summer Reading): Description:
A thriller from the author of THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY. Uncertain evidence suggests Soviet missiles are being put in place close to the German border, while vital film has gone missing and a courier is dead. The Department has to find an old hand who can prove that they are not out of the running yet.

Title: Single And Single: Description:
When a corporate lawyer from the House of Single & Single is murdered in Turkey, a string of events occur, from the arrest of a Russian freighter to the disappearance of a London financier. The logical connection must be one of love, deceit or the triumph of humanity. About the Author John le Carré was born in 1931. He attended the universities of Bern and Oxford and later taught at Eton. He spent five years in the British Secret Service. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Single & Single by John le Carre. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved This gun is not a gun. Or such was Mr Winser's determined conviction when the youthful Alix Hoban, European Managing Director and Chief Executive of Trans-Finanz Vienna, St. Petersburg and Istanbul, introduced a pallid hand into the breast of his Italian blazer and extracted neither a platinum cigarette case nor an engraved business card, but a slim blue-black automatic pistol in mint condition, and pointed it from a distance of six inches at the bridge of Mr Winser's beakish but strictly non-violent nose. This gun does not exist. It is inadmissible evidence. It is no evidence at all. It is a non-gun. Mr Alfred Winser was a lawyer, and to a lawyer facts were there to be challenged. All facts. The more self-evident a fact might appear to the layman, the more vigorously must the conscientious lawyer contest it. And Winser at that moment was as conscientious as the best of them. Nevertheless, he dropped his briefcase in his astonishment. He heard it fall, he felt the pressure of it linger on his palm, saw with the bottom of his eyes the shadow of it lying at his feet: my briefcase, my pen, my passport, my air tickets and travellers' cheques. My credit cards, my legality. Yet he did not stoop to pick it up, though it had cost a fortune. He remained staring mutely at the non-gun. This gun is not a gun. This apple is not an apple. Winser was recalling the wise words of his law tutor of forty years ago as the great man spirited a green apple from the depths of his frayed sports coat and brandished it aloft for the inspection of his mostly female audience: `It may look like an apple, ladies, it may smell like an apple, feel like an apple' --- innuendo --- `but does it rattle like an apple?' --- shakes it --- `cut like an apple?' --- hauls an antique breadknife from a drawer of his desk, strikes. Apple translates into a shower of plaster. Carols of laughter as the great man kicks aside the shards with the toe of his sandal. But Winser's reckless flight down memory lane did not stop there. From his tutor's apple it was but a blinding flash of sunlight to his greengrocer in Hampstead where he lived and dearly wished himself at this moment: a cheery, unarmed apple-purveyor in a jolly apron and straw hat who sold, as well as apples, fine fresh asparagus that Winser's wife Bunny liked, even if she didn't like much else her husband brought her. Green, remember, Alfred, and grown above ground, never the white --- pressing the shopping basket on him. And only if they're in season, Alfred, the forced ones never taste. Why did I do it? Why do I have to marry people in order to discover I don't like them? Why can't I make up my mind ahead of the fact instead of after it? What is legal training for, if not to protect us from ourselves? With his terrified brain scouring every avenue of possible escape, Winser took comfort in these excursions into his internal reality. They fortified him, if only for split seconds, against the unreality of the gun. This gun still does not exist. But Winser couldn't take his eyes off it. He had never seen a gun so close, never been obliged to take such intimate note of colour, line, markings, burnishment and style, all perfectly pointed up for him in the glaring sunlight. Does it fire like a gun? Does it kill like a gun, extinguish like a gun, removing face and features in a shower of plaster? Bravely, he revolted against this ridiculous possibility. This gun does not, absolutely does not exist! It is a chimera, a trick of white sky, heat and sunstroke. It is a fever gun brought on by bad food, bad marriages and two exhausting days of smoky consultations, unsettling limousine rides through sweltering, dusty, traffic-choked Istanbul, by a giddying early-morning dash in the Trans-Finanz private jet above the brown massifs of central Turkey, by a suicidal three-hour drive over switchback coast roads and hairpin bends under red rock precipices to the world's utter end, this arid boulder-strewn promontory of buckthorn and broken beehives six hundred feet above the Eastern Mediterranean, with the morning sun already turned to full, and Hoban's unblinking gun --- still there and still a phantasm --- peering like a surgeon into my brain. He closed his eyes. See? he told Bunny. No gun. But Bunny was bored as usual, urging him to have his pleasure and leave her in peace, so instead he addressed the Bench, a thing he hadn't done for thirty years: My Lord, it is my pleasant duty to advise the Court that the matter of Winser versus Hoban has been amicably resolved. Winser accepts that he was mistaken in suggesting that Hoban brandished a gun during a site conference in the southern Turkish hills. Hoban in return has provided a full and satisfactory explanation of his actions... And after that, out of habit or respect, he addressed his Chairman, Managing Director and Svengali for the last twenty years, the eponymous founder and creator of the House of Single, the one and only Tiger Single himself: It's Winser here, Tiger. Very well indeed, thank you, sir, and how about your good self? Delighted to hear it. Yes, I think I can say that everything is exactly as you wisely predicted, and the response to date has been entirely satisfactory. Only one small thing --- water under the bridge now --- not a breakpoint --- our client's man Hoban gave the impression of drawing a gun on me. Nothing in it, all a fantasy, but one does like to be forewarned... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Title: The Little Drummer Girl: Description:
Lured by Israeli intelligence into the world of espionage, Charlie, a young actress, is plunged into a deceptive and delicate trap to ensnare an elusive Palestinian terrorist.

Title: The Honourable Schoolboy (coronet Books): Description:
This is the second of le Carre's Smiley novels, featuring the character of George Smiley who was introduced in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy". The story involves the betrayal of a Soviet spy and suspicions that the network has been infiltrated from the top downwards. About the Author John le Carré was born in 1931. He attended the universities of Bern and Oxford and later taught at Eton. He spent five years in the British Secret Service. Excerpted from The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre. Copyright © 1989. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London's secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin. One crowd, led by a blimpish fellow in charge of microphone transcription, went so far as to claim that the fitting date was sixty years ago when 'that arch-cad Bill Haydon' was born into the world under a treacherous star. Haydon's very name struck a chill into them. It does so even today. For it was this same Haydon who, while still at Oxford, was recruited by Karla the Russian as a 'mole', or 'sleeper', or in English, agent of penetration, to work against them. And who with Karla's guidance entered their ranks and spied on them for thirty years or more. And whose eventual discovery - thus the line of reasoning - brought the British so low that they were forced into a fatal dependence upon their American sister service, whom they called in their own strange jargon 'the Cousins'. The Cousins changed the ga! me entirely, said the blimpish fellow: much as he might have deplored power tennis or bodyline bowling. And ruined it too, said his seconds.To less flowery minds, the true genesis was Haydon's unmasking by George Smiley and Smiley's consequent appointment as a caretaker chief of the betrayed service, which occurred in the late November of 1973. Once George had got Karla under his skin, they said, there was no stopping him. The rest was inevitable, they said. Poor old George: but what a mind under all that burden!One scholarly soul, a researcher of some sort, in the jargon a 'burrower', even insisted, in his cups, upon January 26th 1841 as the natural date, when a certain Captain Elliot of the Royal Navy took a landing party to a fog-laden rock called Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River and a few days later proclaimed it a British colony. With Elliot's arrival, said the scholar, Hong Kong became the headquarters of Britain's opium trade to China and in consequence one of the pillars of the imperial economy. If the British had not invented the opium market - he said, not entirely serious - then there would have been no case, no ploy, no dividend: and therefore no renaissance of the Circus following Bill Haydon's traitorous depredations.Whereas the hard men - the grounded fieldmen, the trainers and the case officers who made their own murmured caucus always - they saw the question solely in operational terms. They pointed to Smiley's deft footwork in tracking down Karla's paymaster in Vientiane; to Smiley's handling of the girl's parents; and to his wheeling and dealing with the reluctant barons of Whitehall, who held the operational purse strings, and dealt out rights and permissions in the secret world. Above all, to the wonderful moment when he turned the operation round on its own axis. For these pros, the Dolphin case was a victory of technique. Nothing more. They saw the shotgun marriage with the Cousins as just another skilful bit of tradecraft in a long and delicate poker game. As to the final outcome: to hell. The king is dead, so long live the next one.The debate continues wherever old comrades meet, though the name of Jerry Westerby, understandably, is seldom mentioned. Occasionally, it is true, somebody does, out of foolhardiness or sentiment or plain forgetfulness, dredge it up, and there is atmosphere for a moment; but it passes. Only the other day a young probationer just out of the Circus's refurbished training school at Sarratt - in the jargon again, 'the Nursery' - piped it out in the under-thirties bar, for instance. A watered-down version of the Dolphin case had recently been introduced at Sarratt as material for syndicate discussion, even playlets, and the poor boy, still very green, was fairly brimming with excitement to discover he was in the know: 'But my God', he protested, enjoying the kind of fool's freedom sometimes granted to naval midshipmen in the wardroom, 'my God', why does nobody seem to recognise Westerby's part in the affair? If anybody carried the load, it was Jerry Westerby. He was the spearhead.! Well, wasn't he? Frankly?' Except, of course, he did not utter the name 'Westerby', nor 'Jerry' either, not least because he did not know them; but used instead the cryptonym allocated to Jerry for the duration of the case.Peter Guillam fielded this loose ball. Guillam is tall and tough and graceful, and probationers awaiting first posting tend to look up to him as some sort of Greek god.'Westerby was the stick that poked the fire,' he declared curtly, ending the silence. 'Any fieldman would have done as well, some a damn sight better.'When the boy still did not take the hint, Guillam rose and went over to him and, very pale, snapped into his ear that he should fetch himself another drink, if he could hold it, and thereafter guard his tongue for several days or weeks. Whereupon, the conversation returned once more to the topic of dear old George Smiley, surely the last of the true greats, and what was he doing with himself these days, back in retirement? So many lives he had led; so much to recollect in tranquillity, they agreed.

Title: Smiley's People: Description:
From the author of THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, a Cold War thriller in which George Smiley, chief of the British Secret Service, prepares to engage in his final battle with his Soviet counterpart. About the Author John le Carre was born in 1931. He attended the universities of Bern and Oxford and later taught at Eton. He spent five years in the British Foreign Service. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpted from Smiley's People by John le Carre. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr George Smiley from his dubious retirement. The first had for its background Paris, and for a season the boiling month of August, when Parisians by tradition abandon their city to the scalding sunshine and the bus-loads of packaged tourists. On one of these August days – the fourth, and at twelve o'clock exactly, for a church clock was chiming and a factory bell had just preceded it - in a quartier once celebrated for its large population of the poorer Russian émigrés, a stocky woman of about fifty, carrying a shopping bag, emerged from the darkness of an old warehou se and set off, full of her usual energy and purpose, along the pavement to the bus-stop. The street was grey and narrow, and shuttered, with a couple of small hôtels de passe and a lot of cats. It was a place, for some reason, of peculiar quiet. The warehouse, since it handled perishable goods, had remained open during the holidays. The heat, fouled by exhaust fumes and unwashed by the slightest breeze, rose at her like the heat from a lift-shaft, but her Slavic features registered no complaint. She was neither dressed nor built for exertion on a hot day, being in stature very short indeed, and fat, so that she had to roll a little in order to get along. Her black dress, of ecclesiastical severity, possessed neither a waist nor any other relief except for a dash of white lace at the neck and a large metal cross, well fingered but of no intrinsic value, at the bosom. Her cracked shoes, which in walking tended outwards at the points, set a stern tattoo rattling between the shut! tered houses. Her shabby bag, full since early morning, gave her a slight starboard list and told clearly that she was used to burdens. There was also fun in her, however. Her grey hair was gathered in a bun behind her, but there remained one sprightly forelock that flopped over her brow to the rhythm of her waddle. A hardy humour lit her brown eyes. Her mouth, set above a fighter's chin, seemed ready, given half a reason, to smile at any time.Reaching her usual bus-stop, she put down her shopping bag and with her right hand massaged her rump just where it met the spine, a gesture she made often these days though it gave her little relief. The high stool in the warehouse where she worked every morning as a checker possessed no back, and increasingly she was resenting the deficiency. 'Devil,' she muttered to the offending part. Having rubbed it, she began plying her black elbows behind her like an old town raven preparing to fly. 'Devil,' she repeated. Then, suddenly aware of being watched, she wheeled round and peered upward at the heavily built man towering behind her.He was the only other person waiting, and indeed, at that moment, the only other person in the street. She had never spoken to him, yet his face was already familiar to her: so big, so uncertain, so sweaty. She had seen it yesterday, she had seen it the day before, and for all she knew, the day before that as well - my Lord, she was not a walking diary! For the last three or four days, this weak, itchy giant, waiting for a bus or hovering on the pavement outside the warehouse, had become a figure of the street for her; and what was more, a figure of a recognisable type, though she had yet to put her finger on which. She thought he looked traqué - hunted - as so many Paris ians did these days. She saw so much fear in their faces; in the way they walked yet dared not greet each other. Perhaps it was the same everywhere, she wouldn't know. Also, more than once, she had felt his interest in her. She had wondered whether he was a policeman. She had even considered asking him, for she had this urban cockiness. His lugubrious build suggested the police, so did the sweaty suit and the needless raincoat that hung like a bit of old uniform from his forearm. If she was right, and he was police, then - high time too, the idiots were finally doing something about the spate of pilfering that had made a bear-garden of her stock-checking for months.By now the stranger had been staring down at her for some time, however. And he was staring at her still. 'I have the misfortune to suffer in my back, monsieur,' she confided to him finally, in her slow and classically enunciated French. 'It is not a large back but the pain is disproportionate. You are a doctor, perhaps? An osteopath?' Then she wondered, looking up at him, whether he was ill, and her joke out of place. An oily gloss glistened on his jaw and neck, and there was an unseeing self-obsession about his pallid eyes. He seemed to see beyond her to some private trouble of his own. She was going to ask him this - You are perhaps in love, monsieur? Your wife is deceiving you? - and she was actually considering steering him into a café for a glass of water or a tisane when he abruptly swung away from her and looked behind him, then over her head up the street the other way. And it occurred to her that he really was afraid, not just traqué but frightened stiff; so perhaps he was not a policeman at all, but a thief, though the difference, she knew well, was often slight. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Title: The Secret Pilgrim (coronet Books): Description:
spies and george smiley