The Sunday Times no. 1 memoir now in paperback.
John le Carre was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. 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. At the end of the Cold War, le Carre widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on 12 December 2020. His posthumous novel Silverview was published in 2021.
Fascinating, important, pithy. Anyone interested in le Carré and
his significant contribution to the literature of the 20th and 21st
centuries will want to read these engaging meanderings through his
life and career.He has plenty to say about Kim Philby, the movie
business, fellow spooks and Russian defectors, encounters with the
great and good, and his intrepid travels to research his novels
*Guardian*
Vintage le Carré ... [he] remains a magician of plot and
counter-plot, a master storyteller
*Observer*
John le Carré is as recognizable a writer as Dickens or Austen
*Financial Times*
When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le
Carré ... they were a journey into the wider world ... These were
the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from
the rest of humankind
*Aung San Suu Kyi*
No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but
thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his
times
*Guardian*
A smashing read
*Wall Street Journal*
Offers thrills of recognition as le Carré's archetypes spring to
life... The 84-year old novelist discards extended narrative and
writes in elegiac fragments with linking harmonies, like the late
works of that other German Romantic, Beethoven
*Financial Times*
Exceptionally well-turned and enjoyable
*Evening Standard*
Grippingly written, it is revealing in ways the author never
intended it to be
*Sunday Telegraph*
Cagey, clever, revealing
*Daily Telegraph*
le Carré is a master of the art... fascinatingly readable
*The Times*
Frank and fascinating
*Daily Express*
The Pigeon Tunnel is a delight... a collection of highly polishes
oddments from a life, assembled to entertain and
inform...fabulously funny
*Radio Times*
A snapshot of a story that is, truly, as extraordinary as any of
his fiction
*Daily Mail*
For me The Pigeon Tunnel just confirms the enigma... extremely
humorous... at no point do I feel that I knew one tiny bit more
than he wants me to know
*Susanne Bier, director of The Night Manager*
He has written an uproarious, darkly poignant and precious book
*New Statesman*
A beautiful book. The great glory of it is it comes close to
unlocking the central mystery of le Carré
*Tony Parsons*
As enthralling as his fiction
*Woman and Home*
Le Carré is such a good writer . . . Though urbane and detached,
there is rage simmering not far below the surface of both le Carré
and his new book. But then, nothing, absolutely nothing, is what it
seems
*Daily Mail*
A deeply personal and touching account of le Carré's life ... it
has undeniable power
*Prospect*
Explosive
*Daily Mail*
le Carré's The Pigeon Tunnel is exquisite
*Hugh Laurie*
I savoured the gravelly, quietly insistent voice of a master
storyteller examining his own life
*The Spectator*
the entertaining recollections of a raconteur
*Telegraph*
Elusive and frank and witty by turns, the spy master gives away
just as much of himself as he wants to in The Pigeon Tunnel,
tracing the story of his life through his walk-on parts in the
history and mythology of the cold war, and the shape-shifting
discipline of his imagination
*Guardian Biographies of the Year*
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