Recent reviews:
| A Most Wanted Man |
| Andrew O’Hagan, published in New York Review of Books 28/05/2009 |
| "le Carré continues to be the world’s most reliable witness to the vicissitudes of international paranoia; his books conceive of a Western world that has a costly obsession with its possible enemies; he shows you this world’s secret missions; its botched jobs, its manifold attempts to thwart the corrupting and sometimes terrifying idealism of others, while keeping the reader close to the exact lineaments of the way we live now.” |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Francois Busnel, published in L'Express 25/10/2008 |
"John le Carré continue d'écrire des petits bijoux. Son dernier roman, astucieusement baptisé "Un Homme très recherché", est l'un de ses meilleurs. (...) Avec ce livre prodigieux John le Carré redonne ses lettres de noblesse au roman d'espionnage."
“John le Carré continues to produce literary gems. His latest novel, wittily entitled A Most Wanted Man, is one of his very best. (…) With this superlative book, John le Carré restores all its prestige to the spy novel genre.”
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Guy Duplat, published in Libre Belgique 24/10/2008 |
"A 77 ans, le grand John Le Carré garde tout son talent et une verdeur que pourraient lui envier bien des jeunes écrivains. (...) Il propose aujourd’hui, avec "Un Homme très recherché", un de ses meilleurs romans. On y retrouve ce qui fait le sel de ses textes: des dialogues au cordeau, une psychologie exacte et des embrouilles entre services secrets."
“At 77, John le Carré still has the talent and vitality that many a young writer could envy. (…) Today, with A Most Wanted Man, he gives us one of his best novels, replete with his trademarks: finely chiselled dialogues, penetrating psychological insights and inter-secret service muddles”
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Michel Abescat, published in Télérama 18/10/2008 |
"Sans doute le meilleur texte de l'auteur depuis La Constance du jardinier, publié en France en 2001. (...) Le roman (explore) les réactions de personnages ordinaires pris dans un combat trop grand pour eux (...). A 77 ans, l'auteur de L'Espion qui venait du froid n'a décidément rien perdu. Ni de son acuité, ni de son ironie, ni de sa gourmandise."
"Arguably le Carré’s best novel since The Constant Gardener, published in France in 2001 (…), A Most Wanted Man explores the reactions of ordinary people caught up in a struggle which is beyond them. At seventy-seven, John le Carré has lost nothing of his insight, irony and relish"
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Sarah Lyall, published in New York Times 03/10/2008 |
| "le Carré’s strongest, most powerful novel, which has a great deal to do with its near perfect narrative pace and the pleasure of its prose, but even more to do with the emotions of its audience, what the reader brings to the book." |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Tim Martin, published in Independent on Sunday 28/09/2008 |
| This is bleak, brilliant, hypnotic stuff and yet another reason to count le Carre among this country's very finest contemporary writers. Unhesitatingly recommended. |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Hari Kunzru, published in The Guardian 27/09/2008 |
| One of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published, a humane novel which takes on the world’s latest binarism and exposes troubling shades of grey. |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Robert Murphy, published in The Metro 25/09/2008 |
| Where literary novelists so often fear to tread, John le Carré has plunged deep using traditional thriller territory to examine the shadowy side of power, as his latest novel does deftly. From its intriguing opening to its pointed conclusion, this should easily maintain le Carré’s high standing among his fans. |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Charles Cumming, published in The Telegraph 20/09/2008 |
| A MOST WANTED MAN is a first-class novel about the most pressing moral and political concerns of our time, not least the scandal of extraordinary rendition. Few writers, and certainly none with le Carre's profile, are tackling these issues with anything like the same thoroughness and vigour. |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Rod Liddle, published in The Sunday Times 17/09/2008 |
| 'It is a beautiful book... and you could scarcely wish for a novel more au courant. Further le Carré has succeeded where others, such as John Updike, have failed: in nailing our post 9/11 paranoias and getting inside the skins of those who are averse to our culture and hegemony.If there is a subtext to his latest book, it is our shortness of memory; our ability to forget the crimes we committed only a generation ago in our late imperial pomp. No British fiction writer- and precious few worldwide - has dealt with contemporary political events with such acuity and imagination as le Carré - he is still in a league of his own.' |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Editorial, published in Guardian 16/09/2008 |
| 'His heroes have none of the simple bombast of America's cold war warriors. They are uncertain, worried about class, loyalties and the role of a post-imperial nation caught between two imperial powers, neither of which can be trusted. There are no simple resolutions in le Carré's finest books.' |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| , published in La Repubblica 15/09/2008 |
"tanto avvincente quanto terribilmente possibile"
"As engrossing as terribly credible" |
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| A Most Wanted Man |
| Lars Ole Sauerberg, published in Jyllands-Posten 10/09/2008 |
"[A Most Wanted Man] er et glimrende destillat af alt det, der udgør John le Carrés forfatterskab op til i dag (...) John le Carré er blevet vor tids Graham Greene."
"A Most Wanted Man is a brilliant distillate of all the ingredients that forms the work of John le Carré up to now (…) John le Carré has become the Graham Greene of our time" |
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| The Mission Song |
| Robert McCrum, published in The Observer 24/09/2006 |
| First things first: this is John le Carre's 20th novel, the latest volume in a remarkable oeuvre that stretches back to Call for the Dead (1961) and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), a modern classic set in a fictional European landscape that now seems almost as remote as the Thirty Years' War. Remarkably, a generation and several revolutions on, he remains close to the top of his game. The Wall has come down, the Evil Empire is at one with Nineveh and Tyre, but there are still dragons to slay under an alien sun. |
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| The Mission Song |
| Michael Saler, published in The Times Literary Supplement 20/09/2006 |
| In a 1977 interview, John le Carré was asked what he wanted from life. “Although it sounds pious,” he responded, “I would like to get better as a writer. I would like to . . . become perhaps more sheer, in some ways to reduce, in other ways to concentrate the scope as it were.” The Mission Song, his twentieth novel, is one of his tautest works, harking back to the lean thrillers he wrote in the early 1960s. It is a fast-paced, entertaining book, in which most of the action takes place over the course of a few days in London and on a nameless northern island. |
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| The Mission Song |
| Dan Zigmond, published in San Francisco Chronicle 15/07/2006 |
| "The Mission Song" is a marvelous return to the John le Carré of old, with all the captivating characters, finely rendered landscapes and messy complexities that have always powered his best work. One can easily imagine Bruno Salvador sitting down to lunch with George Smiley and debating the familiar question: Can we truly justify our wicked spies? |
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