The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

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John le Carré

Mystery & Suspense

Aug 24, 2018

A British intelligence agent throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, David Cornwell, under the pseudonym John le Carré, went on to use his personal experience of the ethically destitute climate of Cold War espionage to create a fictional world more unglamorous, chilling, and dispirited than any previously ventured by a writer of spy thrillers—and more gripping and compelling in just about every way. In thrall to “the expediency of temporary alliances” that makes them pawns in an amoral but mortal calculus, his always compromised characters move through an alienated existence wearing the masks of their assumed identities. The price of their disguises is le Carré’s recurring theme, and it is nowhere more powerfully explored than in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, in which one man’s weariness, confusion, and pervasive doubt cross the border of his peculiar occupation to resonate with broader, if less dramatic, human truths. It is very hard to forget.

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