He can communicate emotion, from sweating fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all, he can tell a tale. Formidable equipment for a rare and disturbing writer (Sunday Times)

I have re-read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold over and over again since I first encountered it in my teens, just to remind myself how extraordinary a work of fiction can be (Malcolm Gladwell)

He's one of those writers who will be read a century from now (Robert Harris)

The best spy story I have ever read (Graham Greene on The Spy Who Came In From The Cold)

Perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain. He will have charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has. He's in the first rank (Ian McEwan)

A literary master for a generation (Observer)

The old magic still holds . . . I might as well say it: to read this simmering novel is to come in from the cold (New York Times)

The literary event of the Autumn (Evening Standard)

What are we to make of Smiley? What is his game? Do we like him? Admire him? Every le Carré reader has wrestled with these questions-and A Legacy of Spies brings them to the fore more directly than any previous book (Vanity Fair)

Ingenious (Washington Post)

Utterly engrossing and perfectly pitched, it is a triumph (Daily Mail)

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his 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 are to be scrutinised by a generation with no memory of the Cold War. Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilt in the name of the greater good.

Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own story, John le Carré has given us a novel of superb and enduring quality.

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