Authors: John le Carre.
Audio CD, pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication Date: 2008-10-07
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    New spies with new loyalties, old spies with old ones; terror as the new mantra; decent people wanting to do good, but caught in the moral maze; all the sound, rational reasons for doing the inhuman thing; the recognition that we cannot safely love, or pity, and remain good "patriots" -- this is the fabric of John le Carré's fiercely compelling and current novel A Most Wanted Man.

A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa.

Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client's survival becomes more important to her than her own career -- or safety. In pursuit of Issa's mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the sixty-year-old scion of Brue Frères, a failing British bank based in Hamburg. Annabel, Issa and Brue form an unlikely alliance -- and a triangle of impossible love is born. Meanwhile, scenting a sure kill in the "War on Terror," the rival spies of Germany, England and America converge upon the innocents.

Thrilling, compassionate, peopled with characters the listener never wants to let go, A Most Wanted Man is a work of deep humanity and uncommon relevance to our times....

Authors: John le Carre.
Audio CD, pages
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Publication Date: 2006-09-19
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    A naive young interpreter stumbles into the heart of an outrageous British plot in the astonishing new novel by the master of the literary thriller.

Abandoned by both his Irish father and Congolese mother, Bruno Salvador (alias Salvo) has long looked for someone to guide his life. Enter Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence. Bruno's African upbringing and fluency in numerous African languages have made him a top interpreter in London, useful to businesses, hospitals, diplomats--and spies. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility known as the "Chat Room," Salvo translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, and snatched voice mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret a secret conference between Central African warlords, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain bring peace to a bloody corner of the world. But then he begins to hear things not intended for his ears......

Authors: John le Carré.
Audio CD, 200 pages
Publisher: Blackstone Audio Inc.
Publication Date: 2007-04-02
Edition: Unabridged

Reviews :

    With the Cold War fought and won, British spymaster Tim Cranmer accepts early retirement to rural England and a new life with his alluring young mistress, Emma. But when both Emma and Cranmer's star double agent and lifelong rival Larry Pettifer disappear, Cranmer is suddenly on the run. In a frantic journey across Europe and into the lawless, battered landscapes of Moscow and southern Russia, he searches for his brilliant protégé while desperately eluding his former colleagues, in order to save whatever of his life he has left......

Authors: John le Carre.
Audio CD, pages
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Edition: Abridged

Reviews :

    By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer and expatriate son of a British Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days when a cinder-block Wall divided Berlin, and the enemy was easy to recognize.
Today, Mundy is a down-at-heel tour guide in South Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served.
And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of his old German student friend, radical, and one-time fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer and chaos addict.
After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only answer to life?this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they?
Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than treachery and fear?
Some free gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could. In Absolute Friends, John le Carr? delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of Communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carr? fans have been waiting for?a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages....

Authors: John Le Carre.
Audio CD, pages
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books
Publication Date: 2001-01-04


Reviews :

    The young and beautiful Tessa Quayle has been horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has disappeared. Her husband, Justin, a career diplomat and amateur gardener at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. His quest takes him to the Foreign Office in London, across Europe and Canada and back to Africa, to the depths of South Sudan, and finally to the very spot where Tessa died. On his way Justin meets terror, violence, laughter, conspiracy and knowledge. But his greatest discovery is the woman he barely had time to love....

Authors: John Le Carre.
MP3 CD, pages
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Publication Date: 2003-04
Edition: MP3

Authors:
Audio CD, pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication Date: 2005-08-16
Edition: Abridged

Reviews :

   

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.

A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.

The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time....

    British diplomat Justin Quayle, complacent raiser of freesias and doting husband of the stunning, much younger Tessa, has tended his own garden in Nairobi too long. Tessa is Justin's opposite, a fiery reformer, "that rarest thing, a lawyer who believes in justice," whose campaigns have earned her a nickname: "the Princess Diana of the African poor." But now Tessa has turned up naked, raped, and dead on a mysterious visit to remote Lake Turkana in Kenya. Her traveling companion (and lover?), the handsome Congolese-Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, has vanished. So has Quayle's complacency.

Tessa had been compiling data against a multinational drug company that uses helpless Africans as guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy with unfortunately fatal side effects. Her report was destroyed by her husband's superiors; was she? It's all somehow connected to the sinister British firm House of ThreeBees, whose ad boasts that it's "buzzy for the health of Africa!" John le Carré symbolically associates ThreeBees with an ominous buzz in the Nairobi morgue: "Over [the corpses], in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note."

The home office tries to take Quayle in out of the cold. He cleverly eludes their clammy embrace, turns spy, and takes off on a global chase to avenge Tessa and solve her murder. Le Carré has lost none of his gift for setting vivid scenes in far-flung places expertly described: London, Germany, Saskatchewan, Kenya. His sprinting thriller prose remains in great shape. And thanks to his 16 years in the British Foreign Office, his merciless send-up of its cutthroat intrigues and petty self-delusions is unbelievably good--or rather, believably so. This is global do-gooder satire on a literary par with Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark.

But you want to know if The Constant Gardener is as good as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Very nearly. Africa's nightmare is more complex than the cold war chess match, and the world pharmaceutical circus is tougher to dramatize than the old spy-versus-spy-versus-spymaster game. Still, le Carré can write a smart, melancholy page-turner, and his moral outrage (the real subject of his books) burns as brightly as ever. --Tim Appelo ...

Authors: John Le Carre.
MP3 CD, pages
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Publication Date: 2004-01
Edition: MP3 Una

Authors: John Le Carre.
Audio CD, pages
Publisher: Chivers Audio Books
Publication Date: 2001-04


Reviews :

   

From Single & Single's "tour de force opening" (Kirkus Reviews), le Carré masterfully establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex and compelling. He fashions a story of corrupt liaisons between criminal syndicates in the new Russian states and the legitimate world of Western finance. He also intimately portrays two families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering the profits; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed-and redeemed-by a son. An enthralling, multilayered tale by an author at the height of his creative powers, Single & Single is le Carré's finest novel in years....

    On a Turkish hillside, ex-Communist mobsters shatter the skull of a corrupt English lawyer. In a sleepy English village, the authorities ask a lonely children's magician how come £5,000,030 sterling just got anonymously deposited in his baby daughter's bank account. With machine-like logic and soulful literary magic, John le Carré links these two events in Single & Single, a stay-up-all-night thriller.

The magician is Oliver Single, the tormented son of Tiger Single, a rogue banker the Financial Times calls "the knight errant of Gorbachev's New East." In fact, Tiger is sinking his fangs into that crucial one-tenth of world trade free of pesky regulations--illegal drugs--and secretly selling donated disaster-relief blood. Mum's the word in Tiger's mob: as the lawyer's executioner notes, "Is not convenient to hear that American capitalists are bleeding poor nations literally."

Oliver comes in from the cold to help spymaster Brock track Tiger down. That £30 sterling signified Judas's silver, but Oliver yearns to save Tiger's life, too. Le Carré wizardly juggles dozens of characters in a zigzag, globetrotting plot. You-are-there realism, narrative drive, pitch-perfect dialog--why can't movies be this good? Like lightning, le Carré's metaphors both dazzle and blazingly illuminate the world.

Ex-spy le Carré was there when the Berlin Wall went up, and his spy craft is legendarily realistic. His female spy/love interest is less so--the opposite of a femme fatale, she might be termed a "deus sex machina." But the book's crucial father-son relationship is quite real, because, like the irresistible villain of A Perfect Spy, Tiger is based on le Carré's own con-man dad. The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure. --Tim Appelo ...

Authors: John Le Carre.
Audio CD, pages
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books
Publication Date: 2004-01-05


Reviews :

    ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is a superbly paced novel spanning fifty-six years, a theatrical masterstroke of tragi-comic writing, and a savage fable of our times, almost of our hours. The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, British soldier's son born 1947 in a shining new independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who have sought sanctuary in the West. The two men meet first as students in riot-torn West Berlin of the late Sixties, again in the grimy looking-glass of Cold War espionage and, most terribly, in today's unipolar world of terror, counter-terror and the war of lies. Deriving its scale from A PERFECT SPY and its passion from THE CONSTANT GARDENER. Le Carre's new novel presents us with magical writing, characters to delight, and a spellbinding story that enchants even as it challenges....