A Legacy of Spies

Not since The Spy Who Came in From The Cold has le Carré exercised his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such thrilling effect – John Banville * Guardian *
Gripping, fast-paced … A splendid novel – Andrew Marr * Sunday Times *
A brilliant novel of deception, love and trust to join his supreme espionage canon – Simon Sebag Montefiore * Evening Standard, Books of the Year *
Perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain. He will have charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has. He’s in the first rank – Ian McEwan
It gives the reader, at long last, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been missing for 54 years … A Legacy of Spies does something remarkable … Like wine, le Carré’s writing has got richer with age * The Times *
le Carré’s masterful new novel – Jonathan Freedland * The Guardian *
The English canon has rarely seen an acclaimed novelist and popular entertainer sustain such a hot streak in old age … A Legacy of Spies achieves many things. Outstandingly, it is a defiant assertion of creative vigour * The Observer *
A Legacy of Spies deploys a complex and ingeniously layered structure to make the past alive in the present once more … le Carré has not lost his touch * Evening Standard *
His writing is as crisp as ever … another tale of intrigue which will slip effortlessly into its place in the Smiley canon * Daily Express *
What are we to make of Smiley? What is his game? Do we like him? Admire him? Every le Carré reader has wrestled with these questions-and A Legacy of Spies brings them to the fore more directly than any previous book * Vanity Fair *

John le Carre was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, 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 Carre 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 12 December 2020. His posthumous novel, Silverview, was published in 2021.

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