Stuart

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.

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 :)

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…

John le Carré has earned worldwide acclaim with extraordinary spy novels, including The Russia House, an unequivocal classic. Navigating readers through the shadow worlds of international espionage with critical knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carré tracks the dark and devastating trail of a document that could profoundly alter the course of world events.

In Moscow, a sheaf of military secrets changes hands. If it arrives at its destination, and if its import is understood, the consequences could be cataclysmic. Along the way it has an explosive impact on the lives of three people: a Soviet physicist burdened with secrets; a beautiful young Russian woman to whom the papers are entrusted; and Barley Blair, a bewildered English publisher pressed into service by British Intelligence to ferret out the document's source. A magnificent story of love, betrayal, and courage, The Russia House catches history in the act. For as the Iron Curtain begins to rust and crumble, Blair is left to sound a battle cry that may fall on deaf ears.

From Publishers Weekly

A dissident Soviet physicist asks a down-at-the-heels, jazz-loving London publisher to issue his insider's study of the chaotic state of Soviet defense. “The master of the spy novel has discovered perestroika , and the genre may never be the same again,” observed PW .
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A mysterious manuscript purporting to prove the Soviet defense system is unworkable is smuggled out of Moscow. It was intended for a flaky English publisher, a womanizing saxophone-playing boozer, but the smuggler has turned it over to British intelligence. In order to prove its authenticity, they recruit the publisher as an amateur spy and send him to Moscow to reestablish contact with the author. But the “truth” Barley Blair finds there is love and a purpose for his shambles of a life. As always with le Carre, this is a compelling spy story, a marvelous entertainment that is also as intelligent, witty, and brooding as many more self-consciously and less satisfying literary novels. It may not be the equal of The Quest for Karla trilogy or of a A Perfect Spy but it bears all the marks of a master, of the man who has both redefined and reanimated the espionage genre. BOMC main selection.
- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.

In Single & Single the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the novel of espionage opens with a haunting set piece, then establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex and compelling. This is a story of corrupt liaisons between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in the West. Le Carré's finest novel in years, it is also an intimate portrait of two families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering the profits; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed, and redeemed, by a son.

This is territory le Carré knows better than anyone. Masterful and prescient, he is writing at the height of his creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist, is one of his most fascinating characters.

Amazon.com Review

On a Turkish hillside, ex-Communist mobsters shatter the skull of a corrupt English lawyer. In a sleepy English village, the authorities ask a lonely children's magician how come £5,000,030 sterling just got anonymously deposited in his baby daughter's bank account. With machine-like logic and soulful literary magic, John le Carré links these two events in Single & Single, a stay-up-all-night thriller.

The magician is Oliver Single, the tormented son of Tiger Single, a rogue banker the Financial Times calls “the knight errant of Gorbachev's New East.” In fact, Tiger is sinking his fangs into that crucial one-tenth of world trade free of pesky regulations–illegal drugs–and secretly selling donated disaster-relief blood. Mum's the word in Tiger's mob: as the lawyer's executioner notes, “Is not convenient to hear that American capitalists are bleeding poor nations literally.”

Oliver comes in from the cold to help spymaster Brock track Tiger down. That £30 sterling signified Judas's silver, but Oliver yearns to save Tiger's life, too. Le Carré wizardly juggles dozens of characters in a zigzag, globetrotting plot. You-are-there realism, narrative drive, pitch-perfect dialog–why can't movies be this good? Like lightning, le Carré's metaphors both dazzle and blazingly illuminate the world.

Ex-spy le Carré was there when the Berlin Wall went up, and his spy craft is legendarily realistic. His female spy/love interest is less so–the opposite of a femme fatale, she might be termed a “deus sex machina.” But the book's crucial father-son relationship is quite real, because, like the irresistible villain of A Perfect Spy, Tiger is based on le Carré's own con-man dad. The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure. –Tim Appelo

Le Carr? reads his new thriller with the voice of a master of the genre, gamely throwing himself into long passages of the dialogue-driven plot. He jumps right into the complex story, set in locations that shift back and forth from Turkey to England, with little set-up explanation. The sense of atmosphere is rich, the polished, descriptive scenes exquisite. However, perhaps due to the abridgment process, a listener is left playing catch-up throughout the tape, struggling to discern what's really going on with the characters. At heart, this is a story of a struggle between father and son, shadowy financier Tiger Single and children's magician Oliver Hawthorne. Tiger has deserted the family to consort with Russian mobsters, and Oliver, having betrayed his father once, now must fight to save his life. They're joined by a complex financial thread that provides the central framework for the international intrigue propelling the action. As audio, the listening experience is frustrating because the material sounds so wonderful, yet it's difficult to keep a grip on what's happening. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover. (Mar.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nocturns, primer llibre de relats del Premi Nobel Kazuo Ishiguro, aplega cinc històries que es poden llegir com si fossin estudis i variacions sobre uns quants temes, o com un concert que exposa aquests temes al primer moviment, els va combinant en els següents i els resol a l'últim. Totes cinc es configuren a partir d'elements habituals en l'autor: l'acarament entre les promeses de joventut i els desenganys del temps, el meravellós i decebedor misteri de l'altre, els finals ambigus i sense catarsi. I la música, sempre relacionada íntimament amb la vida i l'obra d'Ishiguro. I, per sobre de tot, un marcat sentiment de desarrelament en els personatges, que sempre estan de pas.

The undisputed master returns with a riveting new book—his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years

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Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the 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, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.
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\nInterweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.

**

An Amazon Best Book of September 2017: John Le Carré, who you may know from the classic George Smiley spy novels, has returned after 25 years to bring us The Legacy of Spies, an interweaving of past and present storylines that allows new readers a way into these (I'm going to say it... perfect ) thrillers and will have longtime fans swooning. I have loved the Smiley series since I first read book one, so I was more than apprehensive when I heard Le Carré was reigniting the storyline with ‘Legacy' after so many years (needlessly as it turns out). Peter Guillam, Smiley's most prized assistant, returns with both grace and vengeance as he evaluates life and the lies he has created to survive. Readers don't need to have read the past titles to understand or enjoy ‘Legacy', but I guarantee you will want to go back and start at the beginning as soon as you turn that final page. –Penny Mann

“[Le Carré's] novels are so brilliant because they're emotionally and psychologically absolutely true, but of course they're novels.”—New York Times Book Review

“[Le Carré] can convey a character in a sentence, land an emotional insight in [a] phrase & demolish an ideology in a paragraph.”
\n—Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Le Carré is such a gifted storyteller that he interlaces the cards in his deck so they fit not simply with this book, but with the earlier ones as well.”—The Atlantic\n
\n“We wish for more complexity and logic in our politics, so we look to make political art that is logical and complex: a genre defined by John le Carré.”—New Republic\n
\n“Any reader who knows le Carré's earlier work, and quite a few who don't, will assume that any attempt to second-guess the mandarins of the Service will backfire. The miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.”
\n—Kirkus

Praise for John le Carré

“One of our great writers of moral ambiguity, a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-man's land.”
\n—Los Angeles Times
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\n“No other writer has charted—pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers—the public and secret histories of his times.”
\n—The Guardian (UK)
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\n“I would suggest immortality for John le Carré, who I believe one of the most intelligent and entertaining writers working today.”
\n—Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
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\n“The constant flow of emotion lifts le Carré not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practicing.”
\n—Financial Times
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\n“A writer of towering gifts.”
\n—The Independent (UK)

Gwendolen Harleth es la mayor de cinco hermanas, que la admiran. Es hermosa, egoísta y malcriada, y cree poseer grandes cualidades. Cortejada por los jóvenes de su localidad, su destino cambiará cuando se cruce con el de Daniel Deronda, un joven aristocrático que vive con su tío y que posee con una disposición natural a ayudar a los demás.

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Sin embargo, el joven vive atormentado al ignorar su verdadero origen. Tras conocer a Daniel y escuchar sus consejos, Gwendolen siente deseos de corregirse, pero la aparición de una chica judía, salvada por Daniel poco antes de morir ahogada en el río, inicia un difícil triángulo amoroso, con el agravante de que el judaísmo era despreciado en la sociedad británica y trataba de recuperar su esplendor.

La caracterización psicológica de los personajes hace de esta novela una obra maestra de la literatura victoriana.

During the Decade of Plagues, pandemics brought civilization to a standstill. The only way out was the Aspis chip: a wearable mRNA vaccine factory, able to immunize you against new viruses on the fly. But not everyone wanted it. They created an open alternative: Darkome, an underground community of biohackers modifying their own genes and bodies. Inara came of age in a Darkome village – but only an Aspis could keep her rare cancer in check, updating her immune system at a pace with her cancer's evolution. Accepting it went against everything Darkome stood for. She had to choose between her community and her life. Now Inara's Aspis appears to have malfunctioned. She can edit her own DNA to be stronger, faster, smarter. It could be the genetic breakthrough of the millennium, but only if she can figure out how it works ... and to stay ahead of those who will stop at nothing to possess her secret. Pursued by Aspis, Darkome radicals and the government, her new abilities may be the only way for Inara to survive. But they may cost her everything, including her humanity.

Wanneer inspecteur Kim Stone naar het huis van Samantha Brown wordt gestuurd, vindt ze de jonge vrouw in haar bed met een doorgesneden keel en een mes in haar hand. Er zijn geen aanwijzingen voor een inbraak of een worsteling, dus Kim beschouwt het als een tragische zelfmoord.\nDan wordt het lichaam van een jonge man gevonden. Net als bij Samantha is zijn keel doorgesneden, maar dat is niet de enige overeenkomst: ze verbleven eerder allebei op Unity Farm, een toevluchtsoord voor mensen die een alternatieve manier van leven nastreven.\nAchter de knusse façade van het oord ontdekken Kim en haar team een sinistere gemeenschap. Kim zet haar carrière op het spel door er een undercover op af te sturen. Ze is ervan overtuigd dat de slachtoffers de moordenaar kenden en vertrouwden. Lukt het haar om op tijd in te grijpen voordat er nog een dode valt?\n‘Je wordt vanaf het begin meegezogen in dit inktzwarte verhaal. Liefhebbers van M.J. Arlidge zullen dit boek zeker waarderen.' VN Detective & Thrillergids

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Mallery comes an unforgettable beach read about love, secrets, betrayal and the family we're born into—and the one we choose for ourselves, perfect for fans of Emily Giffin and Mary Kay Andrews.
What would you do if you caught your brother cheating on your best friend?
While Beth is proud of her Malibu beach shop, Surf Sandwiches, she's even prouder of her charismatic brother Rick, who rose from foster care through surgical residency. She makes subs, he saves lives. Life takes a turn for the happy after she finds out Rick is dating her new best friend, Jana. Then Jana's handsome brother adds even more sparkle to Beth's days...and nights.
But when she catches Rick with another woman—like, with-with—her visions of an idyllic family future disappear in one awful instant. Either she betrays her brother, or she keeps his secret and risks losing the man she loves and her...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians is a chilling historical horror novel tracing the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.
A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.

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Um adolescente precisa investigar horrores indizíveis para solucionar uma série de acontecimentos sinistros numa cidadezinha antes que haja uma nova vítima. A Casa da Noite é a estreia triunfal de Jo Nesbø no terror, uma história sobre coragem e destruição, com uma boa dose de reviravoltas.

Após a trágica morte dos pais, Richard Elauved, um garoto de 14 anos, é mandado para a casa dos tios na cidadezinha isolada de Ballantyne.

Não demora muito para ele ser tratado como um pária na escola. E tudo piora quando um colega de turma, Tom, desaparece e Richard se torna o principal suspeito do suposto crime; afinal, é fácil colocar a culpa no garoto esquentadinho recém-chegado da cidade grande. Ainda mais porque ele foi a última pessoa a ver Tom, e ninguém acredita em seu relato: segundo Richard, Tom estava passando um trote para um número aleatório da lista quando foi sugado pelo receptor da cabine telefônica – algo digno de filme de terror.

Ninguém acredita, exceto Karen, sua única amiga e por quem secretamente nutre uma paixão. Ela o encoraja a seguir as pistas que a polícia se recusa a investigar. Assim, Richard encontra o endereço do tal telefone: uma casa abandonada no meio da floresta do Espelho. Ele vai até lá, mas a casa é assustadora, com telhados que lembram os chifres do diabo, com um carvalho que de tão grande atravessou o teto, e onde há um rosto sinistro, pálido, que o encara de uma janela do andar superior. O que ele sente ali é estranho, como se estivesse se olhando num espelho...

Quando outro colega da escola desaparece, Richard precisa encontrar um jeito de provar sua inocência – e preservar sua sanidade – conforme lida com uma terrível magia que, além de tentar tomar conta da cidade, parece querer destruí-lo.

Mas há um porém: Richard talvez não seja o narrador mais confiável da própria história...

A Casa da Noite é uma narrativa sinistra sobre solidão, coragem, amizade, destruição e loucura. Sobre o que podemos e o que não podemos ver. É uma história sobre uma casa sombria em uma floresta ainda mais sombria.

“Uma história sobre amadurecimento que se torna cada vez mais assustadora, repleta de tensão e revelações.” – Sunday Express

Jo Nesbø é um dos maiores autores de thrillers do mundo, com grandes best-sellers como O leopardo, O fantasma, Polícia, O filho, A sede, Macbeth, Boneco de Neve e Faca. Seus livros já foram traduzidos para mais de 50 idiomas e venderam mais de 60 milhões de exemplares no mundo. Antes de se tornar autor de thrillers, Jo Nesbø jogava futebol no Molde, time da primeira divisão da Noruega, mas seu sonho de jogar profissionalmente no Tottenham foi arruinado quando rompeu os ligamentos do joelho aos 18 anos. Depois de três anos de serviço militar, fez faculdade de administração e formou a banda Di Derre. O grupo chegou ao topo das listas da Noruega, mas Jo Nesbø continuou trabalhando como analista financeiro, processando números durante o dia e tocando durante a noite. Quando foi contratado por uma editora para escrever uma biografia contando a vida na estrada com sua banda, Jo Nesbø apareceu com a trama do primeiro livro do detetive Harry Hole: O morcego.

Two ex-military nurses, one human and one alien, share a friendship in a city following an alien invasion.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

INSIDE THE WORLD OF MIXED MARTIAL ARTS - AND MURDER... 
Angel Dare went into Witness Protection to escape her past — not as a porn star, but as a killer who took down the sex slavery ring that destroyed her life. But sometimes the past just won't stay buried.
When a former co-staris gunned down, it's up to Angel to get his son, a hotheaded MMA fighter, safely through the unforgiving Arizona desert, shady Mexican bordertowns, and the seductive neon mirage of Las Vegas...

When the shadowy circumstances of a relative's death are brought to light, Jane and Lila are plunged into the recesses of an underground drug operation with links to a burgeoning fascist movement. 
The Pool sisters have gone into business together: a down-home if unequal P.I. enterprise. That is, until Lila is tipped off to an explosive piece of news. An old friend of their Aunt Ruth's—a lawyer and academic who'd committed suicide years ago—believes that Ruth was murdered. Prior to her death, Ruth had represented a chemist who'd been struggling to patent a dangerous synthetic opioid. But once the client, Travis Nutt, was poised to lose, he went rogue and unleashed the adulterant as a street drug with the power of cartel funding behind him. Can the twins now bring this cult-like billionaire to justice?
Meanwhile, the rest of the Pool family is staying busy. Jane, newly divorced, and doing things for herself for a change, has...

Based on a true story, Shiokari Pass is a moving tale of love eclipsed by sacrifice and tragedy.
The hero of this Japanese novel is the young and idealistic Nobuo Nagano, who finds himself forced to make a heart-rending decision, when he must choose between his childhood sweetheart, Fujiko, and his newly found Christian faith. Set in Hokkaido at the turn of the nineteenth century, when for the first time Western culture and ideas were beginning to challenge Japan's long-held traditions, Shiokari Pass takes an intriguing look at Japanese life and thought of a hundred years ago.
Filled with drama and featuring a spectacular climax amidst the snows of Hokkaido, the book was a bestseller in Japanese and a successful motion picture as well. Based on the life of a high-ranking railway employee who was revered for his humanitarian deeds, Shiokari Pass offers a revealing glimpse of the long, hard road traveled by Japanese Christians.

“Vivid, dense, powerful imagery ... hard to put down!” — Washington Post“A complex, bizarre, and unique vision of the near future with a kaleidoscopic mix of politics, pop, and paranoia.” — Bruce Sterling
“John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier.” — William Gibson
With Eclipse Penumbra, the second volume in John Shirley's cyberpunk trilogy, A Song Called Youth returns to the World War III era, in which a nuclear strike has decimated Europe. The survivors are dominated by the Christian Fascist Second Alliance, a fundamentalist international security organization attempting to impose apartheid across Europe. Their master plan for a new world order, Project Total Eclipse, involves seizing control of FirStep, an orbiting space colony with the potential to extend their domination throughout the world. All that stands in their way are the rebels of the New Resistance, a gang...

Durante los primeros años de la II Guerra Mundial, John Kemp, un joven estudiante de clase humilde, llega desde un pequeño núcleo de provincias a la ciudad universitaria donde cursará sus estudios. En medio de un ambiente lúgubre, deprimido y profundamente intimidatorio elegirá, como salvoconducto emocional, a una chica anónima sobre la que dibujará una identidad alternativa, y la bautizará con el nombre de Jill. A partir de ese momento, comenzará el movimiento feroz de una espiral obsesiva sobre ella hasta que los acontecimientos experimentan un giro sorpresivo que pondrán al protagonista contra las cuerdas. Su vida y sus aspiraciones, así como sus deseos y anhelos darán paso a un relato poético y grandioso de la mano de uno de los maestros de la literatura inglesa del siglo XX.

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

The first Angel Dare novel, MONEY SHOT, earned universal acclaim: finalist for the Edgar, Anthony and Barry Awards, won the Crimespree Award and chosen by fans as their favorite Hard Case Crime title of all time. Angel's story continued in CHOKE HOLD and – after almost 15 years – it comes to a blazing conclusion in THE GET OFF.
WILL THE CHANCE FOR A NEW LIFE BE ANGEL'S LAST SHOT?
Tagged as a cop killer when a mission of vengeance goes wrong, Angel Dare finds herself on the run, with an unexpected burden: she's pregnant. Her desperate flight takes Angel across the American west, where cattle barons lock horns with rodeo bullfighters and life can end suddenly and brutally. A renegade couple living off the grid near the border might offer a chance of escape – but can Angel reach them in time...?

A timely reimagining of the story of Dionysus-Greek god of ecstasy, revelry, and ruin-and a captivating queer love story for readers of The Song of Achilles and Elektra.

Raised in a Greek legion, Phaidros has been taught to follow his commander's orders at all costs. But when Phaidros rescues a baby from a fire at Thebes's palace, his commander's orders cease to make sense: Phaidros is forced to abandon the blue-eyed boy at a temple, and to keep the baby's existence a total secret.
Years later, struggling with panic attacks and flashbacks, Phaidros is enlisted by the Queen to find her son, Thebes' young crown prince, who has vanished to escape an arranged marriage. The search leads him to a blue-eyed witch named Dionysus, whose guidance is as wise as the events that surround him are strange. In Dionysus's company, Phaidros witnesses sudden outbursts of riots and unrest, and everywhere Dionysus goes, rumors follow about a new god, one sired...

“The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.” In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that “those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don't will have to look for them.”

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Quando você está fadado a perder tudo que ama, pelo que ainda vale a pena lutar?

Ao amanhecer do dia da colheita da Quinquagésima Edição dos Jogos Vorazes, o medo toma conta dos distritos de Panem. Nesse ano, em comemoração ao Massacre Quaternário, o dobro de tributos será levado de suas casas.

No Distrito 12, Haymitch Abernathy está tentando não pensar muito nas suas chances de ser sorteado – só quer sobreviver ao dia e passar um tempo com a garota que ama.

Mas, ao ser escolhido, todos os sonhos de Haymitch desmoronam. Ele é separado da família e da namorada e enviado para a Capital com outros três tributos do Distrito 12: uma menina que considera quase uma irmã, um rapaz viciado em calcular chances e apostas, e a garota mais arrogante da cidade.

Conforme os Jogos se aproximam, Haymitch compreende que está tudo armado para o seu fracasso, mas parte dele deseja lutar... e deseja também que essa luta reverbere muito além da arena mortal.

Suzanne Collins é autora bestseller de Jogos Vorazes, Em chamas, A esperança e A cantiga dos pássaros e das serpentes, que compõem a série Jogos Vorazes e foram a base para a popular franquia cinematográfica. Além disso, alcançou a lista americana de mais vendidos com a série The Underland Chronicles. Um ano na selva, seu livro infantil ilustrado, foi publicado em 2013 nos EUA e recebeu excelentes críticas. Até o momento, seus livros foram publicados em 53 idiomas pelo mundo.

Now a major motion picture from Fernando Meirelles, the Academy Award-nominated director of *City of God*

The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time. The novel opens in northern Kenya with the gruesome murder of Tessa Quayle--young, beautiful, and dearly beloved to husband Justin. When Justin sets out on a personal odyssey to uncover the mystery of her death, what he finds could make him not only a suspect among his own colleagues, but a target for Tessa's killers as well.

A master chronicler of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, John le Carre portrays the dark side of unbridled capitalism as only he can. In The Constant Gardener he tells a compelling, complex story of a man elevated through tragedy as Justin Quayle--amateur gardener, aging widower, and ineffectual bureaucrat--discovers his own natural resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.

Amazon.com Review

British diplomat Justin Quayle, complacent raiser of freesias and doting husband of the stunning, much younger Tessa, has tended his own garden in Nairobi too long. Tessa is Justin's opposite, a fiery reformer, “that rarest thing, a lawyer who believes in justice,” whose campaigns have earned her a nickname: “the Princess Diana of the African poor.” But now Tessa has turned up naked, raped, and dead on a mysterious visit to remote Lake Turkana in Kenya. Her traveling companion (and lover?), the handsome Congolese-Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, has vanished. So has Quayle's complacency.

Tessa had been compiling data against a multinational drug company that uses helpless Africans as guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy with unfortunately fatal side effects. Her report was destroyed by her husband's superiors; was she? It's all somehow connected to the sinister British firm House of ThreeBees, whose ad boasts that it's “buzzy for the health of Africa!” John le Carré symbolically associates ThreeBees with an ominous buzz in the Nairobi morgue: “Over [the corpses], in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.”

The home office tries to take Quayle in out of the cold. He cleverly eludes their clammy embrace, turns spy, and takes off on a global chase to avenge Tessa and solve her murder. Le Carré has lost none of his gift for setting vivid scenes in far-flung places expertly described: London, Germany, Saskatchewan, Kenya. His sprinting thriller prose remains in great shape. And thanks to his 16 years in the British Foreign Office, his merciless send-up of its cutthroat intrigues and petty self-delusions is unbelievably good–or rather, believably so. This is global do-gooder satire on a literary par with Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark.

But you want to know if The Constant Gardener is as good as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Very nearly. Africa's nightmare is more complex than the cold war chess match, and the world pharmaceutical circus is tougher to dramatize than the old spy-versus-spy-versus-spymaster game. Still, le Carré can write a smart, melancholy page-turner, and his moral outrage (the real subject of his books) burns as brightly as ever. –Tim Appelo

As the world seems to move ever further beyond the comparatively clear-cut choices of the Cold War into a moral morass in which greed and cynicism seem the prime movers, le Carr ‘s work has become increasingly radical, and this is by far his most passionately angry novel yet. Its premise is similar to that of Michael Palmer's Miracle CureDcynical pharmaceutical firm allied with devious doctors attempts to foist on the world a flawed but potentially hugely profitable drugDbut the difference is in the setting and the treatment. Le Carr has placed the prime action in Africa, where the drug is being surreptitiously tested on poor villagers. Tessa Quayle, married to a member of the British High Commission staff in corruption-riddled contemporary Kenya, gets wind of it and tries in vain to blow the whistle on the manufacturer and its smarmy African distributor. She is killed for her pains. At this point Justin Quayle, her older, gentlemanly husband, sets out to find out who killed her, and to stop the dangerous drug himselfDat a terrible cost. Le Carr ‘s manifold skills at scene-setting and creating a range of fearsomely convincing English characters, from the bluffly absurd to the irredeemably corrupt, are at their smooth peak here. Both The Tailor of Panama and Single & Single were feeling their way toward this wholehearted assault on the way the world works, by a man who knows much better than most novelists writing today how it works. Now subject and style are one, and the result is heart-wrenching. (Jan. 9) Forecast: Admirers of the author who may have found some of the moral ambiguities and overelaborate set pieces of his last two books less than top-drawer le Carr will welcome a return to his best form. There is a wonderfully charismatic and idealistic heroine, which will bolster female readership, and the appearance of the book shortly after the release of a movie of Tailor (starring Jamie Lee Curtis) is bound to create an extra rush of media attention. Be prepared for the biggest le Carr sales in years.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.