“A Small Town in Germany is an exciting, compulsively readable and brilliantly plotted novel. Le Carré has shown once more that he can write this kind of book better than anyone else around—and he has done so without repeating himself.” — The New York Times Book Review
In the late 1960s, in the town of Bonn, capital of West Germany, a British Embassy officer by the name of Leo Harting goes missing—and forty-three confidential-or-higher files with him.
Dispatched from the British Foreign Office to investigate, Alan Turner arrives in Bonn to find riots, protests, and a tenuous balance of power. As if there isn’t enough pressure, the embassy’s head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, makes it clear he has no intentions of making Turner’s investigation an easy one.
As Turner peels back the layers of chaos and desperation swirling around Bonn and the British Embassy, and grows ever closer to understanding the missing Leo Harting, he begins to uncover a web of deceit and corruption that threatens to upend British interests in Western Europe.
A “political ghost story,” as author John le Carré himself put it, A Small Town in Germany marks the first of his works taking place outside the realm of George Smiley’s Circus. Examining both geopolitical and psychological tensions—and where the two intersect—le Carré weaves yet another masterful spy thriller.
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"Exciting, compulsively readable, and brilliantly plotted.”"
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" I can't get into this recording at all. I believe there is a recording with Michael Jayston from the 90s. Why was this re-recorded with Ralph Lister? The performance just doesn't work and I find it unlistenable. "
— Wil, 11/23/2024John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (1931–2020), was an English author of espionage novels. Eight of his novels made the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list between 1983 and 2017. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third book, secured him a worldwide reputation as one of the greatest spy novelists in history. Numerous major motion pictures have been made from his novels, as well as several television series. After attending the universities at Berne and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service, serving briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. Being a member of MI6 when he wrote his first novel, Call for the Dead in 1961 in Hamburg, it necessitated the use of a nom de plume, by which he continued to be known. His writing earned him several honorary doctorate degrees and the Somerset Maugham Award, the Goethe Medal, and the Olof Palme Prize.
Ralph Lister is an actor, voice actor, and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. He spent fifteen years in London theater before moving to the United States to focus on film and television. He has held numerous roles in Shakespeare and modern dramas, as well as starring roles in independent films. His voice and character work can be heard in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearland 13 Going On 30. He lives in Los Angeles.