Book summary

Hailed as "the best spy story I have ever read" by Graham Greene, and "the best spy story ANYBODY has ever read" by The New York Times THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1962) cemented author John Le Carre's reputation as a master of the espionage novel, and elevated the genre to the same level as the best literary writing and political thinking. During The Cold War, a burned-out spy accepts a last assignment that involves him being intentionally recruited by East German intelligence. As he proceeds with his mission, he discovers that he's lost his taste for spying and now questions the rightness of rules he once obeyed without question. With its intricate twists and double-crosses, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD works as a wonderful thriller--its authenticity heightened by Le Carre's work in Her Majesty's Secret Service--but it is the book's profound questioning of the moral consequences of covert operations in the name of "freedom" that has made it a classic. In 2006, Publishers Weekly named it the greatest spy novel ever written.

Media reviews

"[This] is a spare, noir-ish exercise very much in the tradition of Hammett and Chandler, in whose stories the private eye's contempt for his adversaries tends to be only slightly greater than his contempt for his clients."