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John Le Carre ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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ABSOLUTE FRIENDS - AUDIO CD-ROM PROGRAM
John Le Carre
2004 10016712 Le Carre's angry, ultimately heartbreaking novel focuses on Ted Mundy, a good-natured British expat in Germany who's eking out a mundane existence guiding tourists through Bavarian castles when his long lost friend Sasha, a diminutive German anarchist, appears to offer him financial and ideological salvation. A surprisingly long flashback takes listeners from Ted and Sasha's first meeting in West Berlin in 1969 through the Cold War and, consequently, their careers as spies, before returning to Sasha's present scheme to save the world from Western imperialism. The story melds the poignant personal tale of Mundy's unwavering altruism with the author's sardonic take on the perfidy of economic globalization. Both themes are well-preserved in this seamless abridgement. No one reads Le Carre better than Le Carre. His nuances, accents and inflections are as brilliantly precise as his prose. For example, Le Carre lends Mundy's voice a note of optimistic naivet‚ that eventually ages into a soft, measured fatalism, but for the ever-aggressive Sasha, his voice takes on a nervous intensity. Mood-appropriate music serves as a bridge between chapters-a Sousa-like march here, a vaguely Beatlesque riff there-adding to this well-produced audio package. From Booklist: *Starred Review* There has been a linear evolution in the mind-set of le Carre's spies over the years--from agonizing over the moral ambiguity of the craft set against a firm belief in its necessity (the Smiley novels), through opting to place individual values over national ones (A Perfect Spy and Russia House), to recognizing that bureaucracy has poisoned the intelligence business from within (the post-cold war novels). Now, driven by recent world events, that evolution takes an even more radical step--to the realization that ideology is irrelevant, that powerful governments are an evil unto themselves, forever the enemy of individual life. It is a harrowing journey to that somber knowledge for Ted Mundy, expatriate son of a British army officer, and his "absolute friend," the crippled German radical Sasha, whose idealism finally engenders its own chaos and makes him easy prey for the powerful. Jumping backward and forward in time, le Carre reveals the history of a friendship in the context of a lifetime of commitment gone sour: student radicalism in Berlin during the '60s; active spying for the West during the waning years of the cold war; and, finally, a parting of the ways, with Sasha continuing to search for the revolution of his dreams while Teddy finds a separate peace. But Iraq and a reunion with his friend reignite Teddy's fervor, paving the way for the inevitable tragedy. Yes, le Carre uses Teddy as a mouthpiece for some strong political opinions (the U.S. is described as a "hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its allotment"), but the novel never becomes the author's soapbox. The human story remains paramount, even if the chilling message is that human stories don't stand much of a chance in the world as we find it. Approximately 6-1/2 hours, abridged on SIX CDs, read by the author John Le Carre', published at Thirty Two dollars. Brand new, never opened. Hachette Audio 1-58621-663-5 / 9781586216634
Audio CD As New Condition Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Price:
12.38 USD
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OUR GAME (A Novel)
Carre, John le
1995 16335 From Publishers Weekly: Le Carre continues to stay ahead of the news, and his latest novel set in the post-Soviet world is smashingly up-to-date, involving nothing less than a desperate breakaway attempt by Chechnya and the murky international dealings that accompany it. His narrator is Tim Cranmer, former secret agent turned winemaker in rural Somerset. Tim's great espionage success was the recruiting of brilliant gadfly Larry Pettifer, who ended up not only stealing Tim's beautiful mistress, the enigmatic Emma, but also disappearing, apparently with a fortune lifted from Russian banks to aid the rebels through shady arms deals. Now the police are looking for Larry, the "Office" is convinced Cranmer must be in on his schemes, and, using all his old spycraft, he sets out to find Larry and Emma. To warn them? To win Emma back? To find out what really happened? To redeem what he increasingly sees as his own shabby, evasive life? The author creates a brilliantly complex character in Tim Cranmer; but such is his skill as a narrator?as always, le Carre's dialogue and scene-setting are incomparable that it is impossible not to empathize strongly with him, and as a result to feel profound ambivalence about Emma and Larry and their many betrayals. The surprising and bitter ending seems to resolve nothing, leaving only a harsh taste of the Western betrayal of ideals of freedom. Le Carre is moving into much tougher territory than his old smooth, sophisticated spy yarns, and readers must become accustomed to increasing ambiguities. Our Game entirely lacks the dazzling action sequences and intricate plotting of The Night Manager, but it cuts even more deeply into the dour contemporary world. An engrossing, exciting spy story published at Twenty Four Dollars.. Knopf 0-679-44189-1 / 9780679441892
Hardcover Brand New Brand New Book Jacket New York
Price:
18.82 USD
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SINGLE AND SINGLE
Carre, John le
1999 14571 John le Carré is, by a large margin, the modern era's greatest chronicler of the shadowy, morally ambiguous world of espionage. His splendid novel, Single & Single, successfully comes to grips with the rapidly changing social and political realities of a world formed in the aftermath of Soviet communism's spectacular collapse. From the Publisher A lawyer from the London banking 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 in the English countryside is asked by his bank to explain a deposit of over five million pounds sterling in his daughter's trust. A Russian freighter is intercepted by police in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant banker, "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air. In Single & Single, the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the spy novel genre, 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 Europe. Le Carre's finest novel in years, it is also an intimate story of family deceit in which a son betrays, then redeems, his corrupt father, and a husband triggers the violent demise of his wife's entire clan. Le Carre is writing at the height of his dramatic and creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist, is one of his most fascinating characters. From The Critics Andrew Ross - Salon In the nerve-wracking first chapter of Single & Single, his 17th book, John le Carré describes the mounting panic and horror - "a mess of sweat and piss and mud" - of a lawyer for a British investment house who realizes he is about to be killed by Georgian gangsters on a lonely Turkish hillside. Cut to a seaside town in Devon, England, where Oliver Single, the son of the investment house's proprietor, is trying to create a new life for himself away from the corruption his father has fallen into. When news of the lawyer's murder gets out and representatives of HM Customs want to know how 5 million pounds have suddenly shown up in Oliver's daughter's trust fund, all hell begins to break loose in a way that will make le Carre's fans rub their hands together in anticipation of another jolly good - if complicated, ambiguous and meaningful - read. As it turns out, Single & Single is neither especially jolly nor particularly meaningful. Perhaps that's because, except for the occasional shimmering passage, there is nothing terribly surprising about the key components of the plot: corrupt British financiers and nasty gangsters from the former Soviet Union who will trade in blood or drugs or anything else available in the new world order's glorious free-market economy. Le Carre relates the means by which these two forces come together with a peculiar flatness and at tedious length. We learn little about either Single, except that the father is short and greedy and the son is tall, attractive to women and, eventually, troubled by his conscience. The ex-Soviets, meanwhile, spend a lot of time eating great hunks of meat cooked over an open fire while tiresomely proclaiming eternal devotion to their ethnicity - "Now you are true Mingrelian!" one of them bellows to Oliver after he has drained a hornful of homemade wine from some part of Georgia. The chief villain, Alix Hoban, wears a "ghostly sneer of the hairline lips" as he whispers into his cell phone, which he does incessantly, even when he's killing people. If he were a dwarf or a hunchback, the picture would be complete. A sense of familiarity pervades the book. Oliver's friendship with the son of his landlady echoes the much more touchingly drawn one of the battered agent Jim Prideaux and the schoolboy Roach ("Jumbo") in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The archness le Carre used to such great effect in the mouth of the oafish Percy Alleline (in Tinker, Tailor) is overused here - anachronistically, as if he were imitating Evelyn Waugh. PUBLISHED AT TWENTY SIX DOLLARS. Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group 0-684-85926-2 / 9780684859262
Hardcover As New As New Book Jacket New York
Price:
18.82 USD
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THE RUSSIA HOUSE
Carre, John le
1989 43410 The master of the spy novel has discovered perestroika , and the genre may never be the same again . Le Carre's latest is both brilliantly up-to-date and cheeringly hopeful in a way readers of the Smiley books could never have anticipated. Barley Blair is a down-at-heels, jazz-loving London publisher who impresses a dissident Soviet physicist during a drunken evening at a Moscow Book Fair. When the physicist attempts to have Barley publish his insider's study of the chaotic state of Soviet defense, British intelligence steps in. Barley, after extensive vetting by both MI5 and the CIA, is made the go-between for further invaluable information, and in the process becomes involved with the physicist's former lover, Katya. The portraits of American and British intelligence agents are, as always, wonderfully acute, and the plot is a dazzling creation. Le Carre's Russia is funny and touching by turns but always convincing, and the love affair between Barley and Katya, subtly understated, is by far the warmest the author has created. But the singing quality of The Russia House , written at the height of le Carre's powers, is its pervading sense of the increasing waste and irrelevance of ongoing cold-war machinations: "That is . . the tragedy of great nations. So much talent bursting to be used, so much goodness longing to come out. Yet all so miserably spoken for that sometimes we could scarcely believe it was America speaking to us at all." . From Library Journal : A mysterious manuscript purporting to prove the Soviet defense system is unworkable is smuggled out of Moscow. It was intended for a flaky English publisher, a womanizing saxophone-playing boozer, but the smuggler has turned it over to British intelligence. In order to prove its authenticity, they recruit the publisher as an amateur spy and send him to Moscow to reestablish contact with the author. But the "truth" Barley Blair finds there is love and a purpose for his shambles of a life. As always with le Carre, this is a compelling spy story, a marvelous entertainment that is also as intelligent, witty, and brooding as many more self-consciously and less satisfying literary novels. It may not be the equal of The Quest for Karla trilogy or of a A Perfect Spy but it bears all the marks of a master, of the man who has both redefined and reanimated the espionage genre. Knopf 0394577892 / 9780394577890
Hardcover As New Condition New York
Price:
14.85 USD
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