Book description
When the Department - faded since the war and busy only with
bureaucratic battles - hears rumour of a missile base near the West
German border, it seems like the perfect opportunity to regain some
political standing in the Intelligence market place. The Cold
War is at its height and the Department is dying for a piece of the action.
Swiftly becoming carried away by fear and pride, the Department and
her officers send deactivated agent Fred Leiser back into East
Germany, armed only with some schoolboy training and his memories of
the war.
In the land of eloquent silence that is Communist East Germany,
Leiser's fate becomes inseparable from the Department's.
John le Carr was educated at the University of Berne (where he
studied German literature for a year) and at Lincoln College, Oxford,
where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern
languages. From 1959 to 1964 he was a member of the British Foreign
Service, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in
Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing
novels in 1961, and has since published twenty-one titles.
