A Legacy of Spies: John Le Carré - Softcover

Carré, John Le

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241308550 ISBN 13: 9780241308554

Publisher: Viking, 2017

Synopsis

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London are to be scrutinised by a generation with no memory of the Cold War. Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilt in the name of the greater good.

Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own story, John le Carré has given us a novel of superb and enduring quality.

About this title

Review:

Vintage le Carré as he ingeniously closes the circle of his long career ... This is an immensely clever piece of novelistic engineering, of which its deviser can be justifiably proud. The ingenuity and skill with which the thing is brought off is breathtaking - really, 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 The Guardian)

This novel offers more than one pleasure. It is not merely good in itself - vintage John le Carré. 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. Le Carré takes a le Carré classic and thickens it into something different from what it was....Like wine, le Carré's writing has got richer with age...Don't wait for the paperback (The Times)

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)

le Carré's masterful new novel (Jonathan Freedland The Guardian)

It is a splendid novel...It is riveting, bitter and will be controversial...le Carré's handling of dialogue remains perfectly fresh. Who else can tell you so much about so many people so quickly? Not a syllable is wasted (Andrew Marr The Sunday Times)

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...Cornwell is signing off with a poignant and brilliant au revoir to le Carré, his alter ego, a writer who is with the immortals (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)

A tense, intricately plotted espionage thriller . . . sheer genius from le Carré (Saga Magazine)

A compelling tale of Cold War duplicity and manoeuvrings in the British secret service ... as ever much of the pleasure of reading le Carre is that you have to be on your intellectual mettle (William Boyd New Statesman)

About the Author:

John le Carré was born in 1931. 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. His recent novels include A Most Wanted Man, Our Kind of Traitor and A Delicate Truth. His only work of non-fiction, The Pigeon Tunnel, was a Number One bestseller in 2016.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0241308550
• ISBN 13: 9780241308554
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272