The best spy novel of all time — Publishers Weekly
It’s the early 1960s, and the newly built Berlin Wall looms large. British intelligence officer Alec Leamas, caught in its shadow, feels the chill all too keenly: the preceding years have seen nearly every member of his Berlin spy network either murdered or captured. To him, the prospect of a desk job feels more like solace than purgatory. When he’s summoned to London by Control, it seems as though he’s finally being called home.
Control, however, still has other designs for Leamas: an assignment that’s equal parts dangerous and audacious. Leamas will get the chance to come home—but only after he’s gone deep undercover as a British turncoat in a bid to get revenge on Hans-Dieter Mundt, the counter-intelligence agent responsible for decimating his web of informants.
One last time, Alec Leamas steps out into the chill of East Berlin.
One of the most critically lauded and widely revered spy novels in literary history, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a tour de force that established John le Carré as a master of the genre.
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"One of those books that I "appreciated" more than I "liked." It's a wonderfully well written book, keeping the reader in constant suspense, and tops many critics' all-time best "spy book" lists. Part of what makes it so great - real life ex-spy Le Carre deliberately created the "anti-James Bond" with three-dimensional, unglamorous characters - was also why it didn't resonate with me because of the seeming lack of characters I could identify with. In fact - and again, this is one of the book's more brilliant twists - the closest to an empathetic character in the book is one of the "bad guys." So I give it five stars for being a brilliantly written deconstruction of the classical spy genre... and three stars for making me just feel depressed after I finished it."
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Jeffrey (4 out of 5 stars)