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...

Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland are the settings for a tale of espionage in which a final, conclusive confrontation takes place between George Smiley and his Russian adversary, Karla. In London at dead of night, an old spy (considered senile by some) is shot in the fact at point-blank range. George Smiley is officially retires, but he is summoned by the news. Lured back to active service, Smiley skillfully maneuvers his people into crisscrossing...

In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse-a desk job-Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service-with...

When British intelligence agent Magnus Pym disappears, two desperate searches are initiated--the hunt of agents, East and West, for the missing spy and Pym's own quest to uncover the mysteries of his own past.