We remember John le Carré (1931-2020)

John le Carré, the British author of many beloved and bestselling spy thrillers, died on Saturday the 12th of December aged 89 after a short battle with pneumonia. His agent, Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown UK, revealed the news in a statement on Twitter, saying ‘John le Carré was an undisputed giant of English literature. He defined the Cold War era and fearlessly spoke truth to power in the decades that followed.’

John le Carré

Born as David Cornwell on the 19th of October, 1931, le Carré forged a career as an intelligence officer for the British Foreign Service shortly after the second World War. He began to write spy thrillers under a pen name after being encouraged by fellow MI5 officer and novelist John Bingham, on whom he would base his most famous character – George Smiley.

Smiley first made an appearance in le Carré’s 1961 debut, Call for the Dead, but fame was ensured with 1963’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, a book that garnered such high profile fans as the novelist Graham Greene. Smiley would go on to appear in a number of other popular spy novels, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), and made his final appearance in 2017’s A Legacy of Spies.

John le Carré went on to write many other standalone novels over the span of his six-decade career, including The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Night Manager (1993) and The Constant Gardener (2001). In 2016, he penned a memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories of My Life, in which he shared details of his difficult childhood.

John is survived by his wife, Jane, and his three sons Nicholas, Timothy, Stephen and Simon.

See more books by John le Carré here.

Silverview

by John le Carré

In Silverview John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years - the secret world itself.

Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise...

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Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

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