His posthumous novel Silverview was published in 2021. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. At the end of the Cold War, le Carre widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. The idea of human love being greater than political reprecussions was a great one. I enjoyed the plot, the dialouge, the characters. The characters were extraordinarly well developed, even for Le Carre who is quite good at that.

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. The Russia House is my favorite Le Carre, although Im just getting started on his books. He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford.

The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. If you enjoyed The Russia House, you might like le Carre's The Secret Pilgrim, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. Each is increasingly certain that if the human race is to have any future, all must betray their countries. A reluctant Barley is quickly trained by British Intelligence and sent to Moscow to liaise with a go-between, the beautiful Katya. Nearly a year later, his drunken promise returns to haunt him. 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. John le Carre's first post-glasnost spy novel, The Russia House captures the effect of a slow and uncertain thaw on ordinary people and on the shadowy puppet-masters who command them Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz.

Le carre the russia house