The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
Audio features
Excerpt from the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation
John le Carré‘s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is now out as a Penguin Modern Classic – get your copy now!
It is 1962: the height of the Cold War and only months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Alex Leamas is a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer whose East Berlin network is in tatters. His agents are either on the run or dead, victims of the ruthlessly efficient East German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Dieter Mundt. Leamas is recalled to London – where, to his surprise, instead of being washed up and consigned to a desk he’s offered a chance to have his revenge by becoming a pawn in a brilliantly-conceived plot to destroy Mundt. But in order to do so he has to stay out in the cold a little longer…
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.
“The best spy story I have ever read”
Graham Greene
“A topical and terrible story… he can communicate emotion, from sweating fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all, he can tell a tale. Formidable equipment for a rare and disturbing writer”
The Sunday Times
“Superbly constructed, with an atmosphere of chilly hell”
JB Priestley