John le Carré: The author's official website

John le Carré books

Currently: UK/Worldwide

A Delicate Truth

A counter-terror operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted in Britain’s most precious colony, Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, and a private defence contractor who is also his close friend. Kit Probyn, Foreign Office veteran with a safe pair of hands and no previous experience of the dark arts, is to be the Minister’s eyes and ears on the ground. His “red telephone”. Read more.

A Most Wanted Man

A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse round his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa. Read more.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

With this superb, now classic novel of suspense, le Carré changed the rules of the game. His story is of one last breathlessly perilous assignment for the agent who wants desperately to end his career of espionage – to come in from the cold…. Read more.

The Complete 'Smiley' Novels

Here is a complete list of the novels featuring John le Carré’s much loved master spy, George Smiley. Read more.

The Mission Song

Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent, twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love-child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese headman’s daughter. Educated first at mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu, and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor Brother Michael to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector. Read more.

Absolute Friends

The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, British soldier’s son born 1947 in a shining new independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. Read more.

The Constant Gardener

Tessa Quayle has been horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has disappeared. Her husband, Justin, a career diplomat and amateur gardener at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. Read more.

Single & Single

A corporate lawyer from the House of Single & Single is shot dead in cold blood on a Turkish hillside for crimes that he does not understand. A children’s entertainer in Devon is hauled to his local bank late at night to explain a monumental influx of cash. A Russian freighter is arrested in the Black Sea. Read more.

The Tailor of Panama

Harry Pendel is the charismatic proprietor of Pendel and Braithwaite Limitada of Panama, through whose doors everyone who is anyone in Central America passes; Andrew Osnard, mysterious and fleshy, is a spy. Read more.

Our Game

Tim Cranmer, retired secret servant, and Larry Pettifer, bored radical don, philanderer and for twenty years Tim’s mercurial double agent against the now vanished Communist threat, have an unresolved rivalry that dates back decades. Read more.

The Night Manager

In the shadowy recesses of Whitehall and Washington an unholy alliance operates between the intelligence community and the secret arms trade. Jonathan Pine is ready to stand up and be counted in the fight against this ultimate heart of darkness. Read more.

The Secret Pilgrim

The Berlin Wall is toppled, the Iron Curtain swept aside. The Secret Pilgrim is Ned, a decent, loyal soldier of the Cold War, who has been in British Intelligence all his adult life. Now, at the end of his career, he is forced to revisit his secret years. Read more.

The Russia House

It is the third summer of perestroika. Barley Blair, London publisher, receives a smuggled document from Moscow. Blair, jazz-loving, drink-marinated, dishevelled, is hardly to the taste of the spymasters, yet he has to be used – sent to the Soviet Union to make contact. Katya, the Moscow intermediary, is beautiful, thoughtful, equally sceptical of all state ideology. Read more.

A Perfect Spy

Magnus Pym, ranking diplomat, has vanished, believed defected. The chase is on: for a missing husband, a devoted father, and a secret agent. Pym’s life, it is revealed, is entirely made up of secrets. Dominated by a father who is also a confidence trickster on an epic scale, Pym has from the age of seventeen been controlled by two mentors. Read more.

The Little Drummer Girl

In this enthralling and thought-provoking novel of Middle Eastern intrigue, Charlie, a brilliant and beautiful young actress, is lured into ‘the theatre of the real’ by an Israeli intelligence officer. Forced to play her ultimate role, she is plunged into a deceptive and delicate trap set to ensnare an elusive Palestinian terrorist…. Read more.

Smiley's People

‘It’s an emergency, George. You remember Vladimir? George, are you awake? You remember the old General?’ The phone call that dragged George Smiley, acting Chief of the Circus, from his bed was a plea to return to active service. But only to bury the case, not to solve it… Read more.

The Honourable Schoolboy

George Smiley has become chief of the battered British Secret Service. The betrayals of a Soviet double agent have riddled the spy network. Smiley wants revenge. He chooses his weapon: Jerry Westerby, ‘The Honourable Schoolboy’, a passionate lover and a seasoned, reckless secret agent. Westerby is pointed east, to Hong Kong. So begins the terrifying game….. Read more.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Smiley and his people are facing a remarkable challenge: a mole – a Soviet double agent – who has burrowed his way in and up to the highest level of British Intelligence. His treachery has already blown some of their vital operations and their best networks. The mole is one of their own kind. But which one?… Read more.

The Naive and Sentimental Lover

Aldo Cassidy is the naive and sentimental lover. A successful, judicious man, he is wrenched away from the ordered certainties of his life by a sudden encounter with Shamus, a wild, carousing artist and Helen, his nakedly alluring wife. Read more.

A Small Town in Germany

The missing man: Harting, refugee background, a Junior Something in the British Embassy in Bonn. The missing files: forty-three of them, all Confidential or above. The timing: appalling and probably not accidental; radical students and neo-Nazis rioting; critical negotiations in Brussels. Read more.

The Looking Glass War

Uncertain evidence suggested Soviet missiles being put in place close to the German border, while vital film had gone missing and a courier was dead. Lacking active agents and the time to recruit afresh, the Department had to find an old hand who would prove its mettle. Read more.

A Murder of Quality

George Smiley was simply doing a favour for an old friend. Miss Brimley had received a letter from a worried woman reader: ‘I’m not mad. And I know my husband is trying to kill me.’ The writer of the letter was one Stella Rode, wife to an assistant master at Carne School, Dorset, and by the time it arrived, she was dead. Read more.

Call For The Dead

George Smiley had liked the man and now the man was dead. Suicide. But why? An anonymous letter had alleged that Foreign Office man Samuel Fennan had been a member of the Communist Party as a student before the war. Nothing very unusual for his generation. Read more.

Our Kind Of Traitor

John le Carré’s 22nd novel, Our Kind of Traitor, is set in contemporary, recession gripped Britain. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula and a diamond-encrusted gold watch. He also has a tattoo on his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis. Read more.