John Le Carré
1) Silverview
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English
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"In Silverview, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years-the secret world itself. Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the city for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems...
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English
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Set in London in 2018, Agent Running in the Field follows a twenty-six year old solitary figure who, in a desperate attempt to resist the political turbulence swirling around him, makes connections that will take him down a dangerous path. In his plot and characterization le Carré is as thrilling as ever and in the way he writes about our times he proves himself, once again, to be the greatest chronicler of our age.
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Series
George Smiley novels volume 9
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English
Description
"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...
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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,...
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English
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In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with Britain on the brink of economic ruin, a young English couple takes a tennis vacation in Antigua. There they meet Dima, a Russian who styles himself the world's number one money launderer, who wants, among other things, a game of tennis. Back in London, the couple is subjected to an all-night interrogation by the British Secret Service, which also needs their help. Their acquiescence will lead...
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English
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On its publication In 1964, John le Carre's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carre combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced, which transports us back to the shadowy years in the early 1960s when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War came to life. When the...
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English
Description
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues...
10) Smiley's people
Author
Series
George Smiley novels volume 7
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
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,...
11) The mission song
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English
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Working as an interpreter for British Intelligence, Bruno Salvador, the abandoned son of an Irish father and Congolese mother, is sent to a mysterious island to interpret a secret conference among Central African warlords.
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English
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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...
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"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.
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The preceeding novel in the George Smiley series, Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy ended with the devastating unmasking of a double agent at the heart of the British Secret Service. Now, in The honourable schoolboy, George Smiley, who has assumed the unenviable job of restoring the health and reputation of his demoralized organization, goes on the offensive.
15) Absolute friends
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English
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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...
17) A perfect spy
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English
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Magnus Pym, the perfect spy, disappears. His colleagues, his superiors, even his wife are baffled and shaken. He must be found because it's a matter of national security. But how can you find someone that no one really knows.
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George Smiley, retired from the world of spies and treachery, is summoned by an old friend to help with a small problem: at the exclusive school where Smiley's friend teaches it seems there's been a murder. Frightfully embarrassing, of course. Perhaps George could quietly look into the matter? Once more, Smiley is up to his elbows in spies and treachery, of a different sort.
19) The Russia house
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English
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Navigating readers through the shadow worlds of international espionage with critical knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carré tracks the dark and devastating trail of a document that could profoundly alter the course of world events. In Moscow, a sheaf of military secrets changes hands. If it arrives at its destination, and if its import is understood, the consequences could be cataclysmic. Along the way it has an explosive...
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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...