John le Carré

Broke and working as a tour guide in Germany, rootless Englishman Ted Mundy catches a glimpse of an old friend hiding in the shadows. A friend he thought was lost to him. A friend who took him from radical 1960s Berlin to life as a double agent. Now, decades later, the Cold War is over and the war on terror has begun. Sasha has another mission for them both, but this time it is impossible to tell the difference between allies - and enemies.

Set in a world of lies and shifting allegiances, Absolute Friends is a savage fable of our times.

Nat, a veteran of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, thinks his years as an agent runner are over. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, MI6 have other plans. Nat is put in charge of The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. His weekly badminton session with the young, introspective, Brexit-hating Ed, offers respite from the new job. But it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Nat down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all.

Arruinado y trabajando como guía turístico en Alemania, el inglés sin raíces Ted Mundy vislumbra a un viejo amigo escondido en las sombras. Un amigo que creía perdido. Un amigo que lo llevó del Berlín radical de los años 60 a la vida de agente doble. Ahora, décadas después, la Guerra Fría ha terminado y la guerra contra el terrorismo ha comenzado. Sasha tiene otra misión para ambos, pero esta vez es imposible distinguir entre aliados y enemigos.

After a routine security check by George Smiley civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the death he begins his own investigation meeting Fennan's widow to find out what led him to such desperation. On the very day Smiley is ordered off the enquiry he receives an urgent letter from the dead man. Do the East Germans - and their agents - know more about this man's death than the Circus previously imagined? 

Tessa Quayle, the young and beautiful wife of a career diplomat has been murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana and her African friend and co-worker has disappeared. Her husband is determined to find out why Tessa was Killed and who the murderers are.

George Smiley, now acting head of the Circus, must rebuild its shattered reputation after one of the biggest betrayals in its history. Using the talents of journalist and occasional spy Jerry Westerby, Smiley launches a risky operation uncovering a Russian money-laundering scheme in the Far East. His aim: revenge on Karla, head of Moscow Centre and the architect of all his troubles.

Book 6 in the George Smiley series.

Peter Guillam, former disciple of George Smiley in the British Secret Service, has long retired to Brittany when a letter arrives, summoning him to London. The reason? Cold War ghosts have come back to haunt him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of the Service are to be dissected by a generation with no memory of the Berlin Wall. Somebody must pay for innocent blood spilt in the name of the greater good...

When the Department - faded since the war and busy only with bureaucratic battles - hears rumours of a missile base near the West German border, it seems the perfect opportunity to regain some standing in the Intelligence world. Desperate for glory and determined to outdo their rivals at the Circus, including George Smiley, they send deactivated agent Fred Leiser back into East Germany, armed only with some schoolboy training and his memories of the war. In the land of eloquent silence that is Communist East Germany, Leiser's fate is no longer his own.

Showing men carried away by fear and pride, The Looking Glass War is a powerful, moving story of human frailty.

Book 4 in the George Smiley series.

As an interpreter of African languages, Bruno Salvador is much in demand. He makes it a principle to remain neutral - no matter what he hears. But when he is summoned on a secret job for British Intelligence, he is told he will have to get his hands dirty. His mission is to help bring democracy to the Congo - democracy that will be delivered at the end of a gun barrel.

The Mission Song is an excoriating depiction of a corrupt world where loyalty can be bought and war is simply an opportunity to settle old scores.

An illegal Muslim immigrant arrives in Hamburg with a traumatic past and the key to a fortune held in a private bank. He says his name is Issa. To the idealistic young human rights lawyer Annabel, determined to save him from deportation, he is a worthy cause. To the intelligence services of Britain, Germany and America, however, he is a potential jihadist - and a pawn between them as they seek to make a kill in the war on terror.

A Most Wanted Man is a gripping and disquieting story of paranoia, disillusionment and betrayal in the moral no-man's land of the post-9/11 world.

Stella Rode has twice disturbed the ancient cloisters of Carne School: firstly by being the wrong sort, with her doilies and china ducks, and secondly by being murdered. George Smiley, who has his own connection with the school, is asked by an old Service friend to investigate. Smiley knows that Stella feared her husband would murder her, but as he probes further beneath Carne's respectable veneer, he uncovers far more than a simple crime of passion.

In his second George Smiley novel, le Carré moves outside the world of espionage to reveal the secrets at the heart of another particularly English institution. The result is a pitch-perfect murder mystery, with Smiley as master detective.

Aldo Cassidy is a cautious man. He has a pleasant family, drives a safe, expensive car and wears luxurious clothes. But his soothing existence is upended when he meets Shamus and Helen - a dazzling, bohemian couple who are everything he is not. As he is drawn into their reckless and unpredictable orbit, all that Cassidy thought he understood about his orderly life begins to unravel.

Told with le Carré's lacerating wit and penetrating observation, The Naive and Sentimental Lover is an acerbic satire of middle-class hypocrisies.

At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities - about an international businessman at the hotel with suspicious dealings - backfires terribly, and people close to Pine begin to die, he commits himself to a battle against powerful forces he cannot begin to imagine.

In a chilling tale of corrupt intelligence agencies, billion-dollar price tags and the truth of the brutal arms trade, John le Carré creates a claustrophobic world in which no one can be trusted.

The Cold War is over and retired secret servant Tim Cranmer has been put out to pasture, spending his days making wine on his Somerset estate. But then he discovers that his former double agent Larry -- dreamer, dissolute, philanderer and disloyal friend - has vanished, along with Tim's mistress. As their trail takes him to the lawless wilds of Russia and the North Caucasus, he is forced to question everything he stood for.

Set in a fragmented, uncertain post-Soviet world, le Carré's brutal story of falsehoods and betrayal shows men playing dangerous games beyond their control.

Magnus Pym, counsellor at the British Embassy in Vienna, has suddenly vanished, believed defected. The chase is on: for a missing husband, a devoted father, and a lifetime secret agent…

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, John 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 his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year's Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.

John le Carré was a defining writer of his time. From The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which changed our understanding of the secret agent from guns and Martinis to shadows and moral ambiguity, to Agent Running in the Field, in which modern Britain is mired in political corruption, he catalogued our sins and recounted the journey of the Anglosphere into the twenty-first century. In these letters, le Carre´ reveals himself to be a consummate correspondent as well as a master novelist.

A Private Spy spans seven decades and chronicles not only le Carre´'s own life but the turbulent times to which he was witness. Beginning with his 1940s childhood, it includes accounts of his National Service and his time at Oxford, and his days teaching the 'chinless, pointy-nosed gooseberry-eyed British lords' at Eton. It describes his entry into MI5 and the rise of the Iron Curtain, and the flowering of his career as a novelist in reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall. Through his letters we travel with him from the Second World War period to the immediate moment in which we live.

At the heart of the collection is le Carre´ the writer: researching, creating and editing, engaging with readers, publishers, film-makers and actors, with politicians and public figures. We find le Carré writing to Alec Guinness to persuade him to take on the role of George Smiley, and later arguing the immorality of the War on Terror with the chief of the German internal security service. In A Private Spy what emerges is a portrait not only of the writer, or of the global intellectual, but, in his own words, of the very private, very passionate and very real man behind the name.

British Intelligence recruits a derelict, saxophone-playing publisher who visits the Moscow Book Fair and stumbles across the hottest Soviet defence secrets in years.

The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that took him from the Western Isles of Scotland to Hamburg and from Israel to Cambodia. He asks himself: Did it do any good? What did it do to me? And what will happen to us now? In this final Smiley novel, the great spy gives his own humane and unexpected answers.

Book 8 in the George Smiley series.

Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise. When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea....

Why was an English lawyer shot dead in Turkey by his firm's top client? How can a down-at-heel magician in Devon explain the vast fortune that has mysteriously appeared in his daughter's trust fund? With customs officer Nat Brock on the trail, the answers point to the House of Single - once a respectable finance company, now entangled with a Russian crime syndicate.

West is pitted against East, and the British establishment against a labyrinthine criminal superpower, in le Carré's searing novel of lives built upon lies.

West Germany in the 1960s is a simmering cauldron of radical protests. Amid the turmoil Leo Harting, a Second Secretary in the British Embassy, has gone missing - along with more than forty Confidential embassy files. Alan Turner of the Foreign Office must travel to Bonn to recover them. As he gets closer to the truth of Harting's disappearance, he will discover that the face of Cold War Europe - and the attentions of the British Ministry itself - are far uglier that he could possibly have imagined.

Le Carré's searing Cold War novel creates a world where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, are horribly blurred.

A Soviet defector has been assassinated on English soil, and George Smiley is called back to the Circus to clear up - and cover up - the mess. But what he discovers sends him delving into the past, on a trail through Hamburg and Paris to Cold War Berlin - and a final showdown with his elusive nemesis, Karla.

The concluding part of le Carré's celebrated Karla Trilogy, Smiley's People sees the last confrontation between the indefatigable spymaster and his great enemy, as their rivalry comes to a shattering end.

Book 7 in the George Smiley series.

Alex Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in Berlin for his British masters, and has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment.

He must travel deep into the heart of Communist Germany and betray his country, a job that he will do with his usual cynical professionalism. But when George Smiley tries to help a young woman Leamas has befriended, Leamas's mission may prove to be the worst thing he could ever have done.

Book 3 in the George Smiley series.

Charmer, fabulist and tailor to Panama's rich and powerful, Harry Pendel loves to tell stories. But when the British spy Andrew Osnard - a man of large appetites, for women, information and above all money - walks into his shop, Harry's fantastical inventions take on a life of their own. Soon he finds himself out of his depth in an international game he can never hope to win.

Le Carré's savage satire on the espionage trade is set in a corrupt universe without heroes or honour, where the innocent are collateral damage and treachery plays out as tragic farce.

A mole, implanted by Moscow Centre, has infiltrated the highest ranks of the British Intelligence Service, almost destroying it in the process. And so former spymaster George Smiley has been brought out of retirement in order to hunt down the traitor at the very heart of the Circus - even though it may be one of those closest to him.

Book 5 in the George Smiley series.