John Le Carre's Complete Bookshelf
With Reviews and Reader Comments Here

"If childhood is the balance of the writer, then I was born a millionaire," David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) once said. "I just had a bottomless well of wonderful experiences." Coldly abandoned by his mother, Olive Glassy, at 5 (a betrayal that surely lurks behind the evil mother character in Single & Single), the future Le Carré was raised by Ronnie Cornwell, a charming rogue of a father he has likened to Gatsby and Micawber (and immortalized in A Perfect Spy and Single & Single). David was separated from his brother and sent to a cold prep school, Sherborne. His family refused to discuss his con-man father's whereabouts (jail) and his mother's reason for leaving (she ran off with her husband's acquaintance, perhaps inspiring George Smiley's cuckolding). Young David fantasized that his father was a glamorous spy on a secret assignment. Like desperate undercover agents, he and his brother tried to piece together the shadowy big picture of their lives from shady associates and scraps of information.

At 16, he went to Berne, learned German, and was stunned by a visit to the Dachau death camp; at 18, he was assigned by Britain's army intelligence service to spirit defectors from East Berlin while the Berlin Wall was going up. He took a first-class degree from Oxford and became an officer in Britain's spy agency in 1958. He has called the cold war spying establishment "the loony bin," and credits its "inside-out thinking" as the inspiration of the books he wrote under the le Carré pseudonym. The third, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, made him so rich and famous he quit spying to write full-time in 1964. Graham Greene called it "the best spy novel I have ever read."

Le Carré's most famous hero, the machismo-deficient master spy George Smiley, shares his creator's passion for obscure German literature, his torment over the sleazy means needed to combat the communist threat, his mute outrage over the cold manipulation of spies by their Machiavellian bosses, and his melancholy philosophy. As Le Carré has said, "I believe that relationships are false and transitory."

Le Carré's work is true and lasting, based in personal experience, professional training, and literary gifts: crisp dialog, moral depth, authentic voices, and tricky plots.

John Le Carré's Complete BOOKSHELF Here

Single & Single (1999)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Our Game (1995)
The Night Manager (1993)
The Secret Pilgrim (1991)
The Russia House (1989)
A Perfect Spy (1986)
The Little Drummer Girl (1983)
Smiley's People (1980)

John Le Carré's Complete BOOKSHELF Here

The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971)
A Small Town in Germany (1965)
The Looking-Glass War (1965)
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963)
A Murder of Quality (1962)
Call for the Dead (1961)

John Le Carré's Complete BOOKSHELF Here

 

 

 

 

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