The Secret Pilgrim: John le Carré (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Le Carré, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014119636X ISBN 13: 9780141196367

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2011

Synopsis

The last of John le Carré's espionage novels to feature his most enduring and well-loved character, George Smiley, and a gripping feat of narrative brilliance, The Secret Pilgrim is published in Penguin Modern Classics with an afterword by the author.

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.

If you enjoyed The Secret Pilgrim, you might like le Carré's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Consummate and enthralling'
Observer

About this title

Review:

'John le Carré has created a fictive world which he has made almost as familiar as that of Dickens ... in terms of scope, skill and ideas, it is streets ahead of most contemporary fiction.' (The Daily Telegraph)

'Powerful ... remarkable ... a grand summation of all John le Carré’s themes.' (The New York Times)

'Le Carré ... at the top of his form.' (Los Angeles Times)

Book Description:

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged, and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess 'the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin'.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 014119636X
• ISBN 13: 9780141196367
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416