The Pigeon Tunnel

Fascinating, important, pithy. Anyone interested in le Carré and his significant contribution to the literature of the 20th and 21st centuries will want to read these engaging meanderings through his life and career.He has plenty to say about Kim Philby, the movie business, fellow spooks and Russian defectors, encounters with the great and good, and his intrepid travels to research his novels – William Boyd * Guardian *Vintage le Carré … [he] remains a magician of plot and counter-plot, a master storyteller * Observer *John le Carré is as recognizable a writer as Dickens or Austen * Financial Times *When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carré … they were a journey into the wider world … These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind * Aung San Suu Kyi *No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his times * Guardian *A smashing read – Richard Davenport-Hines * Wall Street Journal *Offers thrills of recognition as le Carré’s archetypes spring to life… The 84-year old novelist discards extended narrative and writes in elegiac fragments with linking harmonies, like the late works of that other German Romantic, Beethoven – John Gapper * Financial Times *Exceptionally well-turned and enjoyable – David Sexton * Evening Standard *Grippingly written, it is revealing in ways the author never intended it to be * Sunday Telegraph *Cagey, clever, revealing * Daily Telegraph *

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.