Showing results by author "John le Carré" in All Categories

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 own investigation into the nature of the man's demise.

It’s the early 1960s, and the newly built Berlin Wall looms large. British intelligence officer Alec Leamas, caught in its shadow, feels the chill all too keenly: the preceding years have seen nearly every member of his Berlin spy network either murdered or captured. To him, the prospect of a desk job feels more like solace than purgatory. When he’s summoned to London by Control, it seems as though he’s finally being called home.

Pulled out of (forced) retirement by his old protégé, Peter Guillam, George Smiley must determine who among the high command at the British Secret Intelligence Service is in fact a Soviet spy—one who’s been climbing their way up the ranks for decades. The stakes are high: the mole is behind more than one failed operation and has lain waste to some of their best informant networks.

When General Vladimir, a Soviet defector, is brutally murdered in London's Hampstead Heath on his way to meet a junior Circus agent, George Smiley finds himself being pulled from retirement—again. As Vladimir's former case officer, Smiley has the privilege of cleaning up and burying the the mess. But one last message from the general, sent just before he died, hints at a major operation led by spymaster Karla, Smiley's Soviet counterpart. Thrust back into the world of Cold War espionage in pursuit of his longtime nemesis, Smiley assembles a small team of trusted operatives.

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.

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 and “occasional” Circus asset. In the Far East, Westerby will have to untangle a web of corruption spread across a region with a reputation for testing loyalties and allegiances.

The complete collection of acclaimed BBC Radio dramas based on John le Carré's best-selling novels, starring Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley. With a star cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, Brian Cox, Ian MacDiarmid, Anna Chancellor, Hugh Bonneville and Lindsay Duncan, these enthralling dramatisations perfectly capture the atmosphere of le Carré's taut, thrilling spy novels.

In the late 1960s, in the town of Bonn, capital of West Germany, a British Embassy officer by the name of Leo Harting goes missing—and forty-three confidential-or-higher files with him. Dispatched from the British Foreign Office to investigate, Alan Turner arrives in Bonn to find riots, protests, and a tenuous balance of power. As if there isn’t enough pressure, the embassy’s head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, makes it clear he has no intentions of making Turner’s investigation an easy one.

For Alisa Brimley, editor of the small magazine Christian Voice, receiving a letter from a longtime subscriber might otherwise be a perfectly normal occasion—except Stella Rode, the reader in question, writes that her husband is planning to kill her. Brimley calls upon an old wartime friend to help her investigate: retired Circus spy, George Smiley. Before Smiley can begin, Rode is found murdered, and Brimley asks Smiley to venture to the small town of Carne, home of the elite Carne School where Rode's husband is a public school junior master.

The most autobiographical of John le Carré’s works, A Perfect Spy follows two narratives: the manhunt for the double agent Magnus Pym, and the makings of the man in question—told in his own words.

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 on the West German border, the long stagnant Department leaps at the chance to restore some of their cache in the intelligence community. Director Leclerc hunts down former field agent Fred Leiser and sends him beyond the wall to East Germany—tying the Department's fate to his.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, is living out his old age on the family farmstead in Brittany when a letter summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself are to be scrutinised under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War.

Tom Baker stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of John le Carré’s powerful thriller. In the third year of perestroika, London publisher Barley Blair is sent a manuscript from Moscow. Exposing Russian nuclear threats as a sham, the information - if it’s genuine - could shatter East-West relations. Jazz-loving, hard-drinking Blair is hardly the spymasters’ idea of the perfect agent, yet they are forced to send him to Moscow to make contact.

A counter-terror operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted in Britain's most precious colony, Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, and a private defence contractor who is also his close friend. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister's Private Secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.

With the Cold War fought and won, British spymaster Tim Cranmer accepts early retirement to rural England and a new life with his alluring young mistress, Emma. But when both Emma and Cranmer's star double agent and lifelong rival, Larry Pettifer, disappears, Cranmer is suddenly on the run, searching for his brilliant protégé, desperately eluding his former colleagues, in a frantic journey across Europe and into the lawless, battered landscapes of Moscow and Southern Russia, to save whatever of his life he has left.

The Berlin Wall is down, the Cold War is over, but the world's second oldest profession is very much alive. Smiley accepts an invitation to dine with the eager young men and women of the Circus' latest intake; and over coffee and brandy, by flickering firelight, he beguilingly offers them his personal thoughts on espionage past, present, and future. In doing so, he prompts one of his former Circus colleagues into a searching examination of his own eventful secret life.

When a Russian émigré is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, Smiley is called out of retirement to exorcise some Cold War ghosts from his clandestine past. What follows is Smiley the human being at his most vulnerable and Smiley the case officer at his most brilliant; and it takes to a thrilling conclusion his career-long, serpentine battle with the enigmatic and ruthless Russian spymaster Karla.

'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now.' The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré's memoir and his first work of nonfiction, is a thrilling journey into the worlds of his 'secret sharers' - the men and women who inspired some of his most enthralling novels - and a testament to the author's extraordinary engagement with the last half century.

John le Carré, the legendary author of sophisticated spy thrillers, is at the top of his game in this classic novel of a world in chaos. With the Cold War over, a new era of espionage has begun. In the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union, arms dealers and drug smugglers have risen to immense influence and wealth. The sinister master of them all is Richard Onslow Roper, the charming, ruthless Englishman whose operation seems untouchable.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the creator of the iconic spy George Smiley, John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl is hailed as one of the author’s best, and the favorite of the likes of Steven King and John Grisham.