Stuart

it’s been 15 years since I read this and I still think about it all the time. Maybe it’s time for a second read…

I co-wrote the foreword to this book and Erin is a friend of mine so I am super biased, but I think this is a great primer in how to think about experimentation, and how to practically go about it. Also, I have 10 copies, so if you’d like one let me know and I’ll ship one to you :)

Longlisted for THE STORY PRIZE | A New Yorker BEST BOOK of 2023 | MOST ANTICIPATED by NylonRolling Stone

A #1 New York Times bestseller for 34 weeks and the book that launched John le Carré's career worldwide

In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse—a desk job—Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service—with himself as the bait. In the background is George Smiley, ready to make the game play out just as Control wants.

Setting a standard that has never been surpassed, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a devastating tale of duplicity and espionage.

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

“The best spy story I have ever read.”

(Graham Greene )

“First-rate and tremendously exciting.”

(Daphne du Maurier )

“Le Carré is one of the best novelists—of any kind—we have.”

(Vanity Fair )

“Written . . . with a pitiless, elegant clarity, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a first-rate thriller and more.”

(Time )

I read Norwegian wood the year after I had been to Japan as a teenager, and the book, and that trip combined were responsible for a now 25 year long fascination with and eduction in Japan and Japanese. I dread re-reading it because I don’t think it could ever live up to that kind of impact, but I will always love it for what it did for me as a directionless teenager looking for a sense of direction and for a place t place my passion. I know Murakami is often critiqued for writing the same novel over and over again, but it’s a good novel, and this is perhaps the best version of it.