John le Carré’s first novel, which introduced his most famous character, George Smiley. Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realised characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged, and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess ‘the cunning of Satan and...
the conscience of a virgin’. This novel, set in London in the late 1950s, finds Smiley engaged in the humdrum job of security vetting.
But when a Foreign Office civil servant commits suicide after an apparently unproblematic interview, Smiley is baffled.
Refusing to believe that Fennan shot himself soon after making a cup of cocoa and asking the exchange to telephone him in the morning, Smiley decides to investigate – only to uncover a murderous conspiracy with its roots in his own secret wartime past.