Product Details
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
By John le Carre

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Product Description

A new hardcover edition of the book Graham Greene called “the best spy story I have ever read.”
 
On its publication in 1964, John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carré combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced, which transports anyone who reads it back to the shadowy years in the early 1960s, when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War came to life.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was hailed as a classic as soon as it was published, and it remains one today.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #37924 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-09-01
  • Released on: 2005-08-11
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 256 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
It would be an international crime to reveal too much of the jeweled clockwork plot of Le Carré's first masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But we are at liberty to disclose that Graham Greene called it the "finest spy story ever written," and that the taut tale concerns Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin. Leamas is responsible for keeping the double agents under his care undercover and alive, but East Germans start killing them, so he gets called back to London by Control, his spy master. Yet instead of giving Leamas the boot, Control gives him a scary assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a sodden failure everybody whispers about. Control sends him back out into the cold--deep into Communist territory to checkmate the bad-guy spies on the other side. The political chessboard is black and white, but in human terms the vicinity of the Berlin Wall is a moral no-man's land, a gray abyss patrolled by pawns.

Le Carré beats most spy writers for two reasons. First, he knows what he's talking about, since he raced around working for British Intelligence while the Wall went up. He's familiar with spycraft's fascinations, but also with the fact that it leaves ideals shaken and emotions stirred. Second, his literary tone has deep autobiographical roots. Spying is about betrayal, and Le Carré was abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his father, a notorious con man. (They figure heavily in his novels Single & Single and A Perfect Spy.) In a world of lies, Le Carré writes the bitter truth: it's every man for himself. And may the best mask win. --Tim Appelo

Review
'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' -- Sunday Times 'Superbly constructed, with an atmosphere of chilly hell' -- Daphne du Maurier 'The best spy story I have ever read' -- Graham Greene

Review

"Superbly constructed, with an atmosphere of chilly hell." --J. B. Priestley

"Le Carré is simply the world’s greatest fictional spymaster.” --Newsweek


“Superbly constructed, with an atmosphere of chilly hell.” (J. B. Priestley )

“Le Carré is simply the world’s greatest fictional spymaster.” (Newsweek )