Book description
The classic Cold War novel.
Into a shadowy, violent and intricate world steeped in moral
ambivalences steps George Smiley - tubby, perceptive and morally
perplexed as ever - sometime acting Chief of the Circus, as the Secret
Service is known.
A Russian émigré woman is accosted in Paris in broad daylight by a
Soviet intelligence officer. A scared Estonian boy plays courier in
Hamburg. In London at the dead of night, George Smiley is summoned
from his lonely bed by news of the murder of an ex-agent. His brief is
to bury the crime, not solve it. His dilemma is the number of ghosts
from the past who clamour to him from the shadows.
Through scenes of mounting revelation, and a cast of superbly drawn
characters, through Switzerland, Hamburg, Paris and the fens of
Schleswig-Holstein, le Carré rallies us irresistibly to the chase,
till we find ourselves at Smiley's very side on the Berlin border,
where Smiley's people - the 'no-men of no-man's land' - conduct their
grimy commerce.
