John le Carré was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the University of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5 &amp; 6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on 12 December 2020. His posthumous novel, Silverview, was published in 2021.

John le Carré

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Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Penguin Audio presents a captivating collection of six John le Carré novels, each featuring the iconic character George Smiley. 
 
This collection includes the finest examples of le Carré's work, written between 1961 and 1979, and contains over 15 hours of unmissable drama. It includes captivating readings of his classic novels Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Smiley's People, performed by the author himself.Call for the Dead introduces George Smiley, a British intelligence officer, who investigates the suspicious suicide of a Foreign Office official, uncovering a web of espionage and deceit. In A Murder of Quality, Smiley is drawn into a murder investigation at a prestigious school, where he must navigate complex social dynamics to uncover the truth behind the crime. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold follows Alec Leamas, a disillusioned British spy, as he embarks on a dangerous mission to bring down an East German intelligence officer, with Smiley orchestrating the operation from behind the scenes. The Looking Glass War is a gripping tale of espionage and betrayal, where Smiley oversees a mission involving a former pilot sent to East Germany, highlighting the bureaucratic infighting within British intelligence. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy sees Smiley called out of retirement to root out a Soviet mole within the highest ranks of the British Secret Service, leading to a tense and intricate investigation. Finally, Smiley's People concludes the collection with Smiley returning to track down his nemesis, Karla, the Soviet spymaster, in a final showdown that tests his skills and resolve. 
 
This definitive collection is a must-have for fans of John le Carré and lovers of espionage fiction, offering an immersive experience into the world of George Smiley. 
 
© Call For The Dead - 1962 David Cornwell 
A Murder Of Quality - 1962 Le Carré Productions 
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold - 1965 le Carré Productions 
The Looking Glass War - 1965 Le Carré Productions 
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - 1974 Le Carré Productions 
Smiley's People - 1979 David Cornwell 
 
(P)2025 Penguin Audio

John le Carré reads George Smiley

Six Stories including Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People

John le Carré was a bestselling author whose books include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. 
 
On this recording we hear - in his own words - about being brought up by his grandparents and feeling deserted by his mother and father. He talks about being creative as a means of escapism, by telling stories about his absent parents; as well as hating public school where he suffered severe beatings. We also hear about when he worked in the army as an interrogator and his experience working in British intelligence. He discusses becoming a writer, creating Smiley, working with Alec Guinness and why he hid behind two names. In addition, we learn about what he thought of awards - and critics. 
 
 Due to the age and nature of this archive material, the sound quality may vary. 
 
©2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

John Le Carré In His Own Words

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Penguin Audio presents a compelling collection of four John le Carré novels, highlighting his modern classics that redefined the espionage genre. 
This collection includes the finest examples of his contemporary classics, written between 2001 and 2010, and contains over 15 hours of unmissable drama. It includes captivating adaptations of his classic novels The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends, A Most Wanted Man, and Our Kind of Traitor. 
 
The Constant Gardener is a powerful tale of love and conspiracy, where British diplomat Justin Quayle investigates the murder of his wife, uncovering a web of corruption and pharmaceutical intrigue in Kenya. Absolute Friends follows the story of Ted Mundy, a British spy, and his German friend Sasha, as they navigate the treacherous waters of post-Cold War espionage, leading to a dramatic and tragic conclusion. A Most Wanted Man is a tense thriller set in Hamburg, where a half-Chechen, half-Russian immigrant becomes the centre of a complex web of international intelligence operations, highlighting the moral ambiguities of the war on terror. Our Kind of Traitor follows British couple Perry and Gail find themselves entangled in a dangerous game of espionage when they befriend a Russian oligarch seeking asylum, leading to a thrilling tale of betrayal and political manoeuvring. 
 
 
Please note: This content is abridged. 
 
 ©The Constant Gardener - 2001 David Cornwell 
Absolute Friends - John le Carré 2018 
A Most Wanted Man - 2008 David Cornwell 
Our Kind Of Traitor - 2010 David Cornwell 
 
(P)2025 Penguin Audio

John le Carré reads his Contemporary Classics

Four Novel Collection including The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends, A Most Wanted Man and Our Kind of Traitor

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

A box set of John le Carré's exceptional and thrilling first five novels, collected together for the first time: 
 
Call for the Dead 
A Murder of Quality 
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 
The Looking Glass War 
A Small Town in Germany

John le Carré, Novels (Box Set)

Volume 1

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
Penguin Audio presents a captivating collection of four John le Carré novels from the 90s, showcasing his mastery of suspense. 
 
 
Renowned for his espionage novels, John le Carré captured the essence of Cold War tension, moral dilemmas, and the personal sacrifices of intelligence operatives. This collection includes the very best examples of his 90s masterpieces, written between 1993 and 1999, and features more than 15 hours of captivating drama. It includes adaptations of his classic novels The Night Manager, Our Game, The Tailor of Panama, and Single & Single. 
 
 
The Night Manager is a suspenseful tale where former British soldier Jonathan Pine is recruited by intelligence operatives to infiltrate the inner circle of a dangerous international arms dealer, leading to a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. Our Game follows the story of retired British intelligence officer Tim Cranmer, who is drawn back into the world of espionage when his former colleague and friend disappears, leading to a complex web of intrigue and betrayal. The Tailor of Panama is a darkly comedic espionage novel where British spy Andrew Osnard recruits a tailor in Panama to gather intelligence, resulting in a tangled mess of lies, deceit, and political manoeuvring. Single & Single is a gripping narrative that follows British lawyer Oliver Single as he uncovers the dark secrets of his father's business dealings, leading to a dangerous confrontation with international criminals. 
 
 
Please note: This content is abridged. 
 
 
©The Night Manager - 1993 David Cornwell 
Our Game -1995 David Cornwell 
The Tailor Of Panama - 1996 David Cornwell 
Single & Single - 2010 David Cornwell 
 
(P)2025 Penguin Audio

John le Carré reads his 90s Masterpieces

Four Novel Collection including The Night Manager, Our Game, The Tailor of Panama and Single & Single

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
 
Penguin Audio presents four gripping tales of espionage, written and read by John le Carre. 
 
 
This collection includes the finest picks of his espionage classics, written between 1968 and 1989, and presents more than 15 hours of thrilling storytelling. It includes captivating adaptations of his classic novels The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, A Small Town in Germany, and The Russia House. The Little Drummer Girl is a thrilling tale of espionage and deception, where actress Charlie is recruited by Israeli intelligence to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist cell, leading to a dangerous game of cat and mouse. A Perfect Spy follows the complex life of Magnus Pym, a British intelligence officer whose troubled childhood and intricate web of lies unravel as he goes missing, prompting a search that reveals deep secrets and betrayals. In A Small Town in Germany, set against the backdrop of Cold War tensions, British embassy staffer Leo Harting disappears in Bonn, Germany, with sensitive documents, leading to a frantic search that uncovers political intrigue and espionage. In The Russia House, British publisher Barley Blair becomes an unlikely spy when he receives a manuscript containing Soviet military secrets, thrusting him into a world of danger and deception as he navigates the treacherous waters of international espionage. 
 
 
Please note: This content is abridged. 
 
 ©The Little Drummer Girl - 1983 David Cornwell 
A Perfect Spy - 1986 David Cornwell 
A Small Town In Germany - 1968 le Carré Productions 
The Russia House - 1989 David Cornwell 
 
(P)2025 Penguin Audio

John le Carré reads his Espionage Classics

Four Novel Collection including The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, A Small Town in Germany and The Russia House

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War. Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilt in the name of the greater good. 
 
Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own story, John le Carré has given us a novel of superb and enduring quality.

A Legacy of Spies

Stella Rode has twice disturbed the ancient cloisters of Carne School: firstly by being the wrong sort, with her doyleys and china ducks, and secondly by being murdered.  George Smiley, who has his own connection with the school, is asked by an old Service friend to investigate. As Smiley probes further beneath Carne's respectable veneer, he uncovers far more than a simple crime of passion. In his second George Smiley novel, le Carré moves outside the world of espionage to reveal the secrets at the heart of another particularly English institution. The result is a pitch-perfect murder mystery, with Smiley as master detective.

A Murder of Quality

A corporate lawyer from the House of Single &amp; Single is shot dead in cold blood on a Turkish hillside. 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. A celebrated London financier has disappeared into thin air. A British customs officer is on a trail of corruption and murder. The logical connection of these events is one of the many pleasures of this extraordinary new novel of love, deceit and the triumph of humanity. Single and Single is a thrilling journey of the human heart - intimate, magical and riotous, revealing le Carré at the height of his dramatic and creative powers.

Single & Single

West Germany in the 1960s is a simmering cauldron of radical protests. Amid the turmoil Leo Harting, a Second Secretary in the British Embassy, has gone missing - along with more than forty Confidential embassy files. Alan Turner of the Foreign Office must travel to Bonn to recover them. As he gets closer to the truth of Harting's disappearance, he will discover that the face of Cold War Europe - and the attentions of the British Ministry itself - are far uglier that he could possibly have imagined. 
Le Carré's searing Cold War novel creates a world where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, are horribly blurred.

A Small Town in Germany

The Cold War is over and retired secret servant Tim Cranmer has been put out to pasture, spending his days making wine on his Somerset estate. But then he discovers that his former double agent Larry ­- dreamer, dissolute, philanderer and disloyal friend - has vanished, along with Tim's mistress. As their trail takes him to the lawless wilds of Russia and the North Caucasus, he is forced to question everything he stood for. 
 
Set in a fragmented, uncertain post-Soviet world, le Carré's brutal story of falsehoods and betrayal shows men playing dangerous games beyond their control.

Our Game

An English couple, Perry and Gail, are taking 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. 
 
What else he wants propels the young lovers on a tortuous journey through Paris to a safe house in the Swiss Alps, to the murkiest cloisters of the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's Intelligence Establishment.

Our Kind of Traitor

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. 
 
Cassidy, plunged into a whirlpool of recklessness and spontaneity, becomes a man bewildered and agonised as he is torn between two poles of a nature more complex than he had ever imagined.

The Naive and Sentimental Lover

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. 
 
Poignant, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is alive with humour, yet prickles with tension until the last heart-stopping page. It is also a work of deep humanity, and uncommon relevance to our times.

A Most Wanted Man

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. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister's Private Secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. 
 
Suspecting a disastrous conspiracy, Toby attempts to forestall it, but is promptly posted overseas. Three years on, summoned by Sir Christopher Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely watched by Probyn's daughter Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and his duty to the Service. 
 
If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?

A Delicate Truth

At a top-secret meeting between Western financiers and Congolese warlords, an interpreter finds his conscience re-awakening. 
 
Bruno Salvador has worked on clandestine missions before. A highly skilled interpreter, he is no stranger to the Official Secrets Act. But this is the first time he has been asked to change his identity - and, worse still, his clothes - in service of his country. 
 
Whisked to a remote island to interpret a top-secret conference between no-name financiers and Congolese warlords, Salvo's excitement is only heightened by memories of the night before he left London, and his life-changing encounter with a beautiful nurse named Hannah. 
 
Exit suddenly, the unassuming, happily married man Salvo believed himself to be. Enter in his place, the pseudonymous Brian Sinclar: spy, lover - and perhaps, even, hero.

The Mission Song

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING MEMOIR OF SPY-WRITING LEGEND JOHN LE CARRÉ 
 
*NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE* 
 
'As recognizable a writer as Dickens or Austen' Financial Times 
 
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War to a career as a writer, John le Carré has lived a unique life. 
 
In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, this book invites us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. 
 
Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters. 
 
'No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his times' Guardian 
 
'When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carré . . . These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind' Aung San Suu Kyi

The Pigeon Tunnel

Stories from My Life: NOW A MAJOR APPLE TV MOTION PICTURE

A Private Spy spans seven decades and chronicles not only le Carré's own life but the turbulent times to which he was witness. Beginning with his 1940s childhood, it includes accounts of his National Service and his time at Oxford, and his days teaching the 'chinless, pointy-nosed gooseberry-eyed British lords' at Eton. It describes his entry into MI5 and the rise of the Iron Curtain, and the flowering of his career as a novelist in reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall. Through his letters we travel with him from the Second World War period to the immediate moment in which we live. 
 
We find le Carré writing to Sir Alec Guinness to persuade him to take on the role of George Smiley, and later arguing the immorality of the War on Terror with the chief of the German internal security service. What emerges is a portrait not only of the writer, or of the global intellectual, but, in his own words, of the very private, very passionate and very real man behind the name.

A Private Spy

The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020

At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities - about an international businessman at the hotel with suspicious dealings - backfires terribly, and people close to Pine begin to die, he commits himself to a battle against powerful forces he cannot begin to imagine. 
 
In a chilling tale of corrupt intelligence agencies, billion-dollar price tags and the truth of the brutal arms trade, John le Carré creates a claustrophobic world in which no one can be trusted.

The Night Manager

Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But after only a couple of months into his new career, Edward, a Polish émigré, shows up at his door with a very keen interest in Julian's new enterprise and a lot of knowledge about his family history. And when a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea . . . 
 
Silverview is the mesmerising story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In this last complete masterwork from the greatest chronicler of our age, John le Carré asks what you owe to your country when you no longer recognise it.

Silverview

Magnus Pym, Counsellor at the British Embassy, is hosting a dinner party at his home in Vienna when he receives an unexpected telephone call that will profoundly affect his life. Once the guests have gone, Pym breaks the news to his wife, Mary: his father, Rick, is dead. In a state of shock, he says something Mary cannot understand - 'After all these years, I'm free.'   Magnus flies back to England to attend the funeral - and doesn't return. As Mary and MI6 spymaster Jack Brotherhood desperately try to find out his whereabouts, it soon becomes clear that Pym has been keeping secrets from both his family and his employers, the British Intelligence Service.   Hiding out in a remote cottage in Devon, where he goes by the name of Mr Canterbury, Magnus begins to write his memoirs - retracing his rise and fall and revealing how Rick led him step by step into a double life of deception, broken promises and betrayal...   This recording, adapted from the John le Carré novel by Rene Basilico, was believed lost from the BBC archive, but was rediscovered after almost twenty years and restored.

A Perfect Spy

Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. But it was Barley who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair, was befriended by a high-ranking Soviet scientist who could be the greatest asset to the West since perestroika began, and made a promise. Nearly a year later, his drunken promise returns to haunt him. A reluctant Barley is quickly trained by British Intelligence and sent to Moscow to liaise with a go-between, the beautiful Katya. Both are lonely and disillusioned. Each is increasingly certain that if the human race is to have any future, all must betray their countries ... 
 
In his first post-glasnost spy novel, le Carré captures the effect of a slow and uncertain thaw on ordinary people and on the shadowy puppet-masters who command them.

The Russia House

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess ‘the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin’.   When a Russian émigré is found murdered on Hampstead Heath, Smiley is called out of retirement to exorcise some Cold War ghosts from his clandestine past. What follows is Smiley the human being at his most vulnerable and Smiley the case officer at his most brilliant; and it takes to a thrilling conclusion his career-long, serpentine battle with the enigmatic and ruthless Russian spymaster Karla...   Starring the award-winning Simon Russell Beale as Smiley, and with a distinguished cast including Anna Chancellor, Lindsay Duncan, Maggie Steed, Alex Jennings and Kenneth Cranham, this enthralling dramatisation captures every nuance of le Carré’s complex and compelling novel - the final book in John le Carré’s Karla trilogy.   ‘a radio triumph... Simon Russell Beale’s pitch-perfect master spy’ - Financial Times.

Smiley's People

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. It is these men, racing each other, who are orchestrating the search to find the perfect spy. 
 
Described by the author as his most autobiographical work, John le Carré's eleventh novel masterfully blends wit, compassion and unflagging tension with the poignant story of an estranged father and son.

‘You’re not to disturb, annoy or offend. They’re walking on a knife edge out there, anything could tilt the balance.’   Missing: one junior diplomat and 43 of the British Embassy’s most confidential files. The timing is alarmingly significant: with neo-Nazi riots and radical student demonstrations, the threat to Germany’s security  is all too apparent. Britain’s own Alan Turner is sent in, with instructions to tread carefully at all costs.   But will he find the missing man and the files before the political situation erupts?   Kenneth Haigh stars as Alan Turner with Bernard Hepton as Rawley Bradfield in a fast-paced, explosive dramatisation of John le Carré’s acclaimed spy story, dramatised by René Basilico.

A Small Town In Germany

Julian Rhind-Tutt is Magnus Pym in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast adaptation of John le Carré’s superb spy novel 
 
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 
 
‘Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.’ 
 
So says Magnus Pym, the spy of the title; and he has betrayed a lot in his life – countries, friends, family and lovers. When Magnus disappears after his father’s funeral, MI6 launches an urgent manhunt to prevent his defection. But Pym is on a search of his own – to unravel the mystery of what made him the perfect spy. 
 
Was it the duplicity of his con artist father, Rick? Or his MI6 mentor and father figure Jack Brotherhood? Or was it Axel, the Czech agent he has known since his teens? All have marked him in crucial ways, and as the net closes around Magnus, he attempts finally to make sense of his life and find the source of his talent for deception... 
 
A Perfect Spy is le Carré’s most autobiographical novel, and has been hailed as his masterpiece. This superlative radio production, starring Julian Rhind-Tutt, Bill Paterson, Michael Maloney and Anton Lesser, is a compelling exploration of identity, treachery and the complexities of the human heart.

BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

A pursuit to solve a murder; a satire on the Etonian ruling class; an espionage thriller of plots and counter-plots; a devilish drama behind East German lines; a deadly hunt for a Soviet mole; a high-risk operation in South East Asia; a final showdown between spymasters; and a survey of the shattered moral landscape of the Cold War. 
 
Featuring the quintessentially English spymaster George Smiley, these are the eight gripping, globetrotting classics which defined John le Carré's oeuvre and earned him a reputation as one of the world's best living novelists, now in A format with a retro cover look created by the award-winning UK designer David Pearson. 
 
Including Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People and The Secret Pilgrim.

The Smiley Collection Boxset

The complete collection of acclaimed BBC Radio dramas based on John le Carre's bestselling novels, starring Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley. 
 
With a star cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, Brian Cox, Ian MacDiarmid, Anna Chancellor, Hugh Bonneville and Lindsay Duncan, these enthralling dramatisations perfectly capture the atmosphere of le Carre's taut, thrilling spy novels. 
 
Call for the Dead is the first Smiley novel, which sees him looking into an apparent suicide only to uncover a murderous conspiracy; 
 
A Murder of Quality finds Smiley investigating a murder in a private school; 
 
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold introduces Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer whose East Berlin network is in tatters; 
 
The Looking Glass War features former spy Fred Leiser, lured back from retirement to investigate a claim that Soviet missiles are being installed close to the West German border; 
 
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the first book in the Karla trilogy, and sees Smiley searching for a mole who has infiltrated the Circus; 
 
The Honourable Schoolboy sees Smiley determined to destroy his nemesis, Karla, and his spy networks; 
 
Smiley's People finds George Smiley called out of retirement to exorcise some Cold War ghosts from his clandestine past; 
 
The Secret Pilgrim sees Smiley invited to dine with the eager new recruits at the Circus. He offers them his thoughts on espionage and, in doing so, prompts a former colleague to re-examine his own eventful secret life. 
 
'A radio triumph...Simon Russell Beale's pitch-perfect master spy' - "Financial Times". 
 
 
 ©2016 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2016 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

The Complete George Smiley Radio Dramas

BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatization

Nick Harkaway

It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy. 
 
But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy… 
 
Set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in the George Smiley saga, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Nick Harkaway's Karla's Choice is an extraordinary, thrilling return to the world of spy fiction's greatest writer, John le Carré.

Karla's Choice

A John le Carré Novel

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A mole, implanted by Moscow Centre, has infiltrated the highest ranks of the British Intelligence Service, almost destroying it in the process. And so former spymaster George Smiley has been brought out of retirement in order to hunt down the traitor at the very heart of the Circus - even though it may be one of those closest to him. 
 
The first part of le Carré's acclaimed Karla Trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy sees the beginning of the stealthy Cold War cat-and-mouse game between the taciturn, dogged Smiley and his wily Soviet counterpart.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Penguin John le Carré Hardback Collection

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