At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. 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. He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age.

Yet all so miserably spoken for that sometimes we could scarcely believe it was America speaking to us at all.'' 350,000 first printing BOMC main selection.John le Carré was born in 1931. So much talent bursting to be used, so much goodness longing to come out.

But the singing quality of The Russia House, written at the height of le Carre's powers, is its pervading sense of the increasing waste and irrelevance of ongoing cold-war machinations: ``That is. Le Carre's Russia is funny and touching by turns but always convincing, and the love affair between Barley and Katya, subtly understated, is by far the warmest the author has created. The portraits of American and British intelligence agents are, as always, wonderfully acute, and the plot is a dazzling creation. Barley, after extensive vetting by both MI5 and the CIA, is made the go-between for further invaluable information, and in the process becomes involved with the physicist's former lover, Katya. When the physicist attempts to have Barley publish his insider's study of the chaotic state of Soviet defense, British intelligence steps in. Barley Blair is a down-at-heels, jazz-loving London publisher who impresses a dissident Soviet physicist during a drunken evening at a Moscow Book Fair. Le Carre's latest is both brilliantly up-to-date and cheeringly hopeful in a way readers of the Smiley books could never have anticipated. The master of the spy novel has discovered perestroika, and the genre may never be the same again.

The russia house john le carré