John Le Carré

"The undisputed master returns with a riveting new book--his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the 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...

2008. A counter-terrorist operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister's personal private secretary, Toby Bell,...

ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is a superbly paced novel spanning fifty-six years, a theatrical masterstroke of tragi-comic writing, and a savage fable of our times, almost of our hours. The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, British soldier's son born 1947 in a shining new independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. The two men meet first as students in riot-torn West Berlin...

With the Cold War over, a new era of espionage has begun. In the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union, arms dealers and drug smugglers have risen to immense influence and wealth. The sinister master of them all is Richard Onslow Roper, the charming, ruthless Englishman whose operation seems untouchable. Slipping into this maze of peril is Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier and current night manager of a posh hotel in Zurich. Having learned to...

"George Smiley is no one's idea of a spy--which is why he's such a natural. But Smiley apparently made a mistake when he concluded that the affable Mr. Fennan had nothing to hide. Why, then, did the man from the Foreign Office shoot himself in the head only hours later? Or did he?"--Page 4 of cover.

A half-starved young Russian man claiming to be a devout Muslim, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, and a sixty-year-old scion of a failing British bank based in Hamburg form an unlikely alliance as the rival spies of Germany, England and America scent a sure kill in thelian"War on Terror, " and converge upon the innocents.

Israeli intelligence agent Kurtz--aka Schulman, aka Gold, aka Raphael--assembles a private army to trap the most dangerous Palestinian terrorist, a trap that perilously involves a brilliant, young English actress.

In London at dead of night, George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Circus (aka the British Secret Service), is summoned from his lonely bed by news of the murder of an ex-agent. Lured back to active service, Smiley skillfully maneuvers his people -- "the no-men of no-man's land"--Into crisscrossing Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland as he prepares for his own final, inevitable duel on the Berlin border with his Soviet counterpart and archenemy,...

Ned considered delivering his own speech to the new "Joes" at Saratt, but in the end, he called on George Smiley, the legendary officer who had retired to Cornwall. Smiley's "fireside chat" gives the dangerous edge back to Ned's memory, transporting him to his own beginnings as an agent in the 60s when the Red Peril was everywhere.

The scene is Bonn, a small provincial town elevated by the cold war to the artificial status of capital city. The protagonists are British diplomats, their wives, and aspiring German politicians. The time is the recent future. While the Foreign Office is locked in a last desperate battle to enter the Common Market, while the new Germany is being carried away on a rising tide of student-bourgeois nationalism, an aging second secretary has vanished...