Our Kind of Traitor

A remarkable book by the master. Reading it is a great experience -- Henning Mankell * Daily Telegraph * A compelling tale of deceit, dialogue and the author's own despair . . . This is a story with frenzy at its heart -- James Naughtie * Daily Telegraph * John le Carr's bullet train of a new thriller is part vintage John le Carr and part Alfred Hitchcock . . . The author's most thrilling thriller in years * The New York Times * If you want to know about the state of Britain today, forget the Booker shortlist. Just read John le Carr's latest thriller * Evening Standard * Few recent plays have had dialogue as good, and few recent literary novels can boast a set of characters so vividly imagined. Our Kind of Traitor is a teasing, beguiling, masterly performance * Sunday Times * A compelling tale of deceit, dialogue and the author's own despair John le Carr's greatest gift may be his ear, which allows him to pick up a tremor of fear in the softest voice or a false note in any exchange of words and play with them to his heart's content. He can therefore create, in dialogue, a trembling soundscape that has a pitch-perfect quality * Sunday Telegraph * Chilling and astute . . . In Our Kind of Traitor, there is not a hair out of place . . . le Carr has done it again for our nasty new age * The Times *

John le Carr was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the University of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5 & 6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carr widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on 12 December 2020. His posthumous novel, Silverview, was published in 2021.