A lawyer from the London finance 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 the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.
In Single & Single the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the novel of espionage 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 the West. Le Carr├®'s finest novel in years, it is also an intimate portrait of 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.
This is territory le Carr├® knows better than anyone. Masterful and prescient, he is writing at the height of his creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist, is one of his most fascinating characters.
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“Any reader who feared that the end of the Cold War would deprive Mr. le Carré of his subject can now feel a measure of relief. If anything, his subject of East-West misunderstanding has grown richer, and he now possesses vast new territories to mine.”
— New York Times
“Le Carré is more than just a great storyteller. In Single & Single, he captures the zeitgeist itself.”
— Tom Wolfe“Le Carré reveals a world at once deeply disquieting and oddly reassuring.”
— People“The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure.”
— Amazon.com, editorial reviewJohn 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.
Michael Jayston is a highly regarded actor, having appeared in numerous films, among them Cromwell, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Zulu Dawn, and Nicholas and Alexandra. He has many television credits to his name as well, such as Element of Doubt, A Bit of a Do, Outside Edge, and Only Fools and Horses, while on stage he has been seen in Henry V and Hamlet for the RSC, as well as Private Lives and The Way of the World. His audiobook work has won him six AudioFile Earphones Awards.