Audiobooks by John Le Carre

A Perfect Spy: BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Julian Rhind-Tutt is Magnus Pym in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast adaptation of John le Carré’s superb spy novelWinner 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.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), , Bill Paterson, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Michael Maloney (Narrator)

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The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories of My Life

“Recounted with the storytelling élan of a master raconteur — by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy.” -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carré, the legendary author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now an Emmy-nominated television series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. 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 writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth; visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year’s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting 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. From the Hardcover edition.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Narrator)

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The Complete George Smiley Radio Dramas: BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatization

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". Duration: 19 hours.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), , Simon Russell Beale (Narrator)

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The Night Manager

John le Carré, the legendary author of sophisticated spy thrillers, is at the top of his game in this classic novel of a world in chaos. With the Cold War over, a new era of espionage has begun. In the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union, arms dealers and drug smugglers have risen to immense influence and wealth. The sinister master of them all is Richard Onslow Roper, the charming, ruthless Englishman whose operation seems untouchable. Slipping into this maze of peril is Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier who's currently the night manager of a posh hotel in Zurich. Having learned to hate and fear Roper more than any man on earth, Pine is willing to do whatever it takes to help the agents at Whitehall bring him down-and personal vengeance is only part of the reason why. Praise for The Night Manager "A splendidly exciting, finely told story . . . masterly in its conception."-The New York Times Book Review "Intrigue of the highest order."-Chicago Sun-Times "Richly detailed and rigorously researched . . . Le Carré's gift for building tension through character has never been better realized."-People "Grimly fascinating, often nerve-wracking, and impossible to put down."-Boston Herald

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), David Case (Narrator)

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A Delicate Truth: A Novel

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston. John le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, will be available from Viking in September 2016'A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations. 'Jonathan Yardley, The Washington PostA counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister's personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to beor a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher Kit Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit's daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?From the Trade Paperback edition.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Narrator)

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A Small Town in Germany

From theNew York Timesbestselling author ofA Delicate TruthandTinker Tailor Soldier Spy 'Haven't you realized that only appearances matter?' The British Embassy in Bonn is up in arms. Her Majesty's financially troubled government is seeking admission to Europe's Common Market just as anti-British factions are rising to power in Germany. Rioters are demanding reunification, and the last thing the Crown can afford is a scandal. Then Leo Harting, an embassy nobody, goes missing with a case full of confidential files. London sends Alan Turner to control the damage, but he soon realizes that neither side really wants Leo found, alive.Set against the threat of a German-Soviet alliance, John le Carré's A Small Town in Germany is a superb chronicle of Cold War paranoia and political compromise. With an introduction by the author.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), Michael Jayston (Narrator)

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The Looking Glass War

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Delicate Truth and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 'You are either good or bad, and both are dangerous.' It would have been an easy job for the Circus: a can of film couriered from Helsinki to London. In the past the Circus handled all things political, while the Department dealt with matters military. But the Department has been moribund since the War, its resources siphoned away. Now, one of their agents is dead, and vital evidence verifying the presence of Soviet missiles near the West German border is gone. John Avery is the Department's younger member and its last hope. Charged with handling Fred Leiser, a German-speaking Pole left over from the War, Avery must infiltrate the East and restore his masters' former glory. John le Carre's The Looking Glass War is a scorching portrayal of misplaced loyalties and innocence lost. With an introduction by the author.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), Michael Jayston (Narrator)

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The Russia House

"The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour." "Glasnost" is on everyone's lips, but the rules of the game haven't changed for either side. When a beautiful Russian woman foists off a manuscript on an unwitting bystander at the Moscow Book Fair, it's a miracle that she flies under the Soviets' radar. Or does she? The woman's source (codename: Bluebird) will trust only Barley Blair, a whiskey-soaked gentleman publisher with a poet's heart. Coerced by British and American Intelligence, Blair journeys to Moscow to determine whether Bluebird's manuscript contains the truth-or the darkest of fictions.At once poignant and suspenseful, John le Carre's The Russia House is a captivating saga of lives caught in the crosshairs of history.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), Michael Jayston (Narrator)

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Call for the Dead: A George Smiley Novel

Go back to Whitehall and look for more spies on your drawing boards. George Smiley is no one's idea of a spy, which is perhaps why he's such a natural. But Smiley apparently made a mistake. After a routine security interview, he concluded that the affable Samuel Fennan had nothing to hide. Why, then, did the man from the Foreign Office shoot himself in the head only hours later? Or did he?The heart-stopping tale of intrigue that launched both novelist and spy, Call for the Dead is an essential introduction to le Carré's chillingly amoral universe.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), Michael Jayston (Narrator)

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A Murder of Quality

'Fielding and Jebedee were dead, Steed-Asprey vanished. Smiley where was he?'John le Carré's second novel, A Murder of Quality, offers an exquisite, satirical look at an elite private school as it chronicles the early development of George Smiley. Miss Ailsa Brimley is in a quandary. She's received a peculiar letter from Mrs. Stella Rode, saying that she fears her husband an assistant master at Carne School is trying to kill her. Reluctant to go to the police, Miss Brimley calls upon her old wartime colleague, George Smiley. Unfortunately, it's too late. Mrs. Rode has just been murdered. As Smiley takes up the investigation, he realizes that in life as in espionage nothing is quite what it appears.

John Le Carre, John Le Carré (Author), Michael Jayston (Narrator)

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Single & Single

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 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 Carre'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 Carre; knows better than anyone. Masterful and prescient, he is writing at the top of his creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist, is one of his most fascinating characters.

John Le Carre (Author), Michael Jayston (Narrator)

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The Constant Gardener

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love. The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.

John Le Carre (Author), John Le Carre (Narrator)

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