The Best John le Carré Books

Thank you for putting together this list of highlights from among John le Carré’s books for us. You’re uniquely well qualified to do this, being both John le Carré’s son and the author of Karla’s Choice, a novel set inside the world George Smiley and The Circus. How would you characterise a John le Carré novel?

I suppose, across the board, they are stories about the interaction between human compassion and wicked structure, and how you square the circle of being inside a society or nation state with trying to be decent. Which seems to be an increasingly 21st-century question.

Then there are narrative hallmarks: emotionally wounded people, difficult relationships, and so on. Overarchingly there is mystery, espionage, sometimes murder, certainly misdeeds in the dark.

But beyond that, they become quite diffuse, because half of them are Cold War-period novels. Then, suddenly, the Cold War comes to an end and you get these other novels which are still very strongly ‘le Carré.’ Perhaps even more le Carré than the Cold War books. Yet they are very different, because the world has changed around them.

They have a common emotional core, something like that.

Yes. I mean, from a writing point of view, the thing I go after—and I’m allowed to say this now, because it was announced the other day that I’m writing the next George Smiley book—is a ‘crime of the spirit.’ Something wicked around which to construct the narrative. You’re either rushing towards it or trying to veer off from it. The question is: How do we avoid this outcome? Or: How do we repair the damage?

We spoke to Shane Whaley of Spybrary recently. He described James Bond and George Smiley as being the two most famous fictional spies in the world. And I do feel that they are equal and opposite. What is it about Smiley that captured the public imagination so strongly?

I think it’s his everyman quality. He cannot climb the outside of a glass office building with only one hand. He doesn’t abseil out of attack helicopters. And so on. He turns up and sits with you, and you tell him more than you meant to, and he does the same thing with someone else, then someone else. And he uncovers the hidden archaeology, the secret truth. Then he brings some kind of resolution.

The idea that you can use that knowledge to unbreak the vase, even a tiny bit, is incredibly appealing. It’s just as appealing now in 2025 as it was in 1963. We live for the idea that someone can turn up and be basically kind and basically intelligent and use that combination of things to deliver, if not justice, then at least the possibility of hope.

That’s a beautiful way of putting it. Shall we look at The Spy Who Came in From the Cold first? Earlier you described it as ‘the daddy.’

It’s also, on some level, the glummest. It runs on rails from its inception to a point of crisis from which there is no return. And it’s really beautifully and brilliantly executed in its inevitability. It’s totally bleak, yet at the same time there is a feather of victory in it as well. It’s a really extraordinary book.

The stage play is coming now, the first time any of my father’s books has gone to the West End stage. That’s also extraordinary, because while watching the play you have this complicity: at any moment in a piece of physical theatre you could, in theory, stand up and stop what’s happening. You’re never going to, but you could, then when it arrives at this inevitable conclusion you feel responsible. It’s really powerful on stage.

If you mention le Carré, most people will say: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. They’ll talk about Richard Burton and, if they’re of that generation they will remember the book coming out. It was definitive for a moment. Like you said, it was the anti-James Bond. Before The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, you had spies who were, for the most part, glamorous people. There was a wash of wartime spying, extraordinary people like Noor Inayat Khan, who parachuted into occupied France and worked with the Resistance behind the lines. Sadly she was eventually caught and executed. But these figures had that gloss of glamour.

Then came the 1960s, and there was a growing sense in the UK that the empire had fallen, and it turned out that some of the time we may have been ‘the baddies,’ you know? So there was this extraordinary reflection, and the revelation that the heroes of empire, or the heroes of democracy, might have been flawed, broken, desperate people looking for a place to put their faith.

Then it came down to the wire: Are we the goodies or are we not? And the answer is, well, do we behave like the goodies? It’s an extraordinarily live-issue book.

Absolutely. When I think of John le Carré, I think: moral crisis. Is that fair?

Yes, and heaven help us, moral crisis is definitely a 21st-century conversation.

I’ll keep us moving. Your next John le Carré book recommendation is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Many consider it the definitive Smiley book.

Absolutely. The Spy Who Comes in From the Cold is this short, driven, linear narrative. It just happens and it plays out. But it doesn’t really give you the architecture of my father’s world of espionage. It’s just a brutal incident. Whereas Tinker, Tailor is far more baroque and meandering. It goes all over the place and introduces you to this entire world of The Circus, George Smiley, and all the players around him.

Obviously there was Sir Alec Guinness in the role, and then there was Gary Oldman. There have been extraordinary audiobook readings—most recently Simon Russell Beale.

As a standalone, Tinker, Tailer is an absolutely top-grade detective story. It’s all about this process I talked about, the archaeology of truth. There has been a gasping crisis or a deep fracture in how the world ought to work, Smiley comes along, and little by little he brushes away the dust, the misdirection, the obfuscation and he holds up the truth and says: This is what happened, here it is. There’s an actual ‘I expect you’re all wondering why I called you here this evening’ reveal. It’s classic. People don’t always realise that, because the theatre of espionage is very strong. But in the end that crime-investigation-solution shape is what stops you from getting lost in the book, and it’s incredibly elegantly executed, in a completely different way to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It meanders, it conceals, it shows you one thing but tells you another. You don’t realise that you know things. It’s just an extraordinary piece of writing, something that has been incredibly successfully adapted.

It’s interesting you hear you dissect the construction of the book, because of course you are now reading these books as a writer, as someone writing books in the same universe. This is probably a good point to mention Karla’s Choice, your new novel, which is set during the lost decade between these two books.

Inevitably these would be the two books that I mention first, because they are the benchmarks of my world at the moment. Karla’s Choice comes directly after The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. George Smiley is unhappy with what’s happened. He’s retired. Then Control, who—as I re-read the books—increasingly comes across as an extraordinarily malign spider in the middle of the Circus web—wants Smiley back, and he wants him back now, and for him to do as he’s told.

He contrives a situation where Smiley does come back to investigate what appears to be a quite minor issue. But of course it balloons and brings Smiley, ultimately, into a situation where he is uncovering the existence of, or the rise of, Karla, who becomes a kind of arch nemesis in Tinker, Tailor, eight or nine years later in the chronology of the books.

In Karla’s Choice, you get to see the evolution of that, the first clash between them, without compromising the mystery of either Smiley or Karla. It’s like the moment at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they put the Ark of the Covenant in a box, they put the box in a warehouse, and you see the trolley going down. All I wanted to know when I saw that final sequence was: what was in the other 10 million boxes? What other mysteries are hidden in that warehouse?

The espionage sublime.

I love that. With Karla and with Smiley, anytime you reveal something, what it has to make you feel is that there are now ten more things that you need to know to understand what you just find out. The mystery has to be deepened every time. Or else it’s like the moment when you see the shark in Jaws and you think, oh.

It’s made of fibreglass.

I wish I’d shut my eyes for that.

I read in an interview that you feel you absorbed the rhythm or the prosody of the Smiley books through childhood, through hearing your father read them out loud at the breakfast table.

Yes. This was a post-facto realisation that I had. I had this moment when I asked myself whether I could write the book. I sat down and wrote little bits of Smiley and it became quickly apparent that it was a very small adjustment in my thinking that was required to find a voice that was authentically mine, but also read as authentically Smiley, authentically The Circus. I won’t say ‘authentically my father’s voice,’ because, interestingly, people go back and forth about that. Some people say this feels like ventriloquism, some people say, actually this feels like Nick. That’s an argument I’m delighted for everyone to have without me. I’m the last person who’s going to know the answer to that question.

I was born in 1972, and my dad used to read the books aloud to my mother as part of the writing process as he wrote them. He’d write by hand, then he’d sit there with a sheaf of 30, 40, 50 pages in his hand, or maybe with her typed version, and read them back to her. Sometimes he would read and you could see her eyebrow twitch, and his pen would come out and go scribble, scribble, scribble. There was a real interplay. As the years went by, that became more and more acute.

As I was acquiring language, I was getting an hour and a half, two hours of Smiley every day, basically. So when I came to do this, it’s in me. It was really a question of going back to a very simple sound in my head, and finding that that was recognisable to people reading.

Let me move us on. Your next book recommendation is John le Carré’s Single & Single. It was released in 1999.

Yes, so this is for love. Absolutely. I read Single & Single for the first time before the proof stage, as I read most of these books as I got older. And I loved it, from start to finish. I recognised myself, I recognised my older brother Tim—we were blended together with, inevitably, my dad, and half a dozen other people to make Oliver Single. My long coat, Tim’s brooding desire to get things right, just these beautiful little sketches. I just fell in love with it.

And if you’re looking for the sin, the sin in Single & Single is so viscerally wicked and extraordinary. I won’t say what it is, but if you are looking for a book about international wickedness in the post-Cold War period, I don’t think I can imagine a more perfect metaphor for it that is also a literal truth about the nature of the world. Something my father did extraordinarily well. Then, thrown in with that, just a wonderful riff on wicked international private banking and enforcement. It’s classic le Carré.

It’s so interesting to hear you talk about John le Carré, as distinct from or part of David Cornwell your father. How do you think about that identity?

That’s a really good question. Obviously, I think of my dad, David Cornwell. His performance piece was John le Carré. That was the coat he wore to write. And there was a difference between the two of them.

You know, Dad was shy. He loved to laugh, but he was quite vulnerable and quite shy. John le Carré feared nothing, you know, and was choleric and radical, and could go out on stage and entertain the Royal Festival Hall and hold the room for hours, just at a lectern in his eighties in an extraordinary act of mesmerism.

They were fundamentally the same, because there’s no such person as John le Carré without David Cornwell. And yet.

The dedication to Karla’s Choice is to the both of them: the one who was the ping pong player, the drinker of wine, the walker of dogs, the teller of stories; and the one who was a novelist. There is truth in that in the same way as they were one person.

I can see that. A complicated truth but a truth nevertheless.

We all contain multitudes. I feel this particularly strongly at the moment because I’m the Nick Harkaway who is now writing a new George Smiley novel. I’m also the guy who just released the second Cal Sounder novel, with my own hat on. I’ve also been Aidan Truhan, and they are now making a TV show of Kill Jackie. I have so many hats, and my dad wore many hats throughout his life.

We contain multitudes. We do many different things. We behave differently with different people, or at least I do—perhaps some people don’t have that experience.

I know I do too. Shall we talk next about The Night Manager? Many people recently encountered it afresh via a beautiful television adaptation, but perhaps you would talk us through the 1993 book?

So The Night Manager and Single & Single are kind of a pair. Each of them is about somebody going voluntarily into a dangerous situation as an undercover figure to root out wickedness, to block bad action in the world. And it follows the person on the ground, as well as, at the same time, the activity of the people in the political apparat and the security apparat.

The success or failure of that activity is a sort of judgement on whether our society is capable of justice, because the rules have to be there for everybody. It doesn’t matter if you are supremely wealthy, you still have to be governed by the rule of law. If not, you no longer have a democracy.

Then, also, in both of these stories is the question: What can you do as the spy? How far can you go? And will you fall in love with the universe of this wicked person whose life you are invading? Because, of course, the bad guys have a great time, you know?

This is something mission critical about the post-Cold War stories. In the Cold War stories, Karla represents, very clearly, the inhumanity of the Soviet machine. Whatever virtues may have been sought in the Soviet project, what it became was very destructive. Karla is the representation of the inhumanity of that system, as is the Wall. They are one and the same.

But when you come into The Night Manager, you’re seeing the very human bad guys. Richard Roper, portrayed by Hugh Laurie in the TV show, is vastly compelling. The idea that you would go to a Richard Roper party… You can absolutely see how everyone would have a great time and be seduced by this wicked man.

Again, you’re coming down to the line where the dividing line between good and bad evaporates and you are left in the grey zone, an area where you can’t tell whether you’ve crossed over the line because you are so close. The line is everywhere.

Your final John le Carré book recommendation is A Delicate Truth, which came out in 2013. You have previously described it as “undeservedly ignored.”

I think A Delicate Truth is an absolutely cracking modern novel. I just love it. Let’s just put that on the table before we get donnish about it.

I read it in a single sitting, and then I read it again a couple of years ago. I just love this book. It’s about misdeeds, political interference at high levels, wickedness inside the British establishment. It dovetails very nicely with The Night Manager and Single and Single. It’s seen from a completely different angle of view—it’s seen in retrospect. And it’s about uncovering the misdeeds of the cover-up.

I think one of the reviews from the moment it came out said that the American characters were, I think, ‘cartoonishly wicked.’ I don’t think that stands up in 2025 as a critique. They look reportage-real.

I think he saw it before we did, before the first Trump presidency, and he put it on the page, and people reacted the way they did before the first Trump presidency, by saying, well, this could never happen. These people are impossible, implausible, preposterous. No, as it turns out, they were not. So there’s that.

And, as I say, the misdeeds of Britain are in the foreground. It’s a really cracking read about the rot inside the doors of our establishment. It’s a great spy story.

I think that brings me to my final question. Do you see his writing career—I guess, John le Carré’s writing career—as unfolding in stages?

I think so. You know, I’m not a proper le Carré-ologist. There are people who devote themselves to this, who do textual analysis at a deep level. I have simply never done that. It’s not part of how I work.

Having said that, I think the first three books have a kind of linear narrative. They observe unities of time and place—not properly, but the take place in relatively short periods of time and they rattle along, and they have very little meandering or digression.

Then you get an intervening period, then you get to Tinker, Tailor, which is much more discursive, beginning by discussing Jim Prideaux at his school, and the characters move around. There’s a lot of ornamentation and sleight of hand to convey information. It’s much less direct. You get that with the core Karla-versus-Smiley trilogy: Tinker, Tailor; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People. Smiley’s People brings the Cold War to a close.

Then you get these transitional books. People look at them and say, well, you know, he’s finding his feet. No, he was absolutely, perfectly iterating what was happening in the world; the world was finding its feet, and the books reflect that.

Then you get into the strongly post-Cold War books, like Single & Single and The Night Manager, which are different again. You’re looking at a new style, a shift in perspective, which comes in around the second decade of this century, where he’s working much shorter, more concise, more reflective. The politics becomes more naked in the later books and less abstract. But it’s always about who is getting stitched up like a kipper, who is getting destroyed for no reason—and how we can stop that from happening.

I find that through-line very persuasive. It’s not difficult to work out.

Is there anything else you would like to mention?

I have a hobby horse at the moment, which is to remind people that he was fun. There have been so many wonderful books and pieces about his ability to determine the geopolitical future, which he did simply by opening his ears and listening to people who understood the cross-currents in the world. People would bring him stories. You know, the inception of The Constant Gardener was people coming to him and saying: If you want real wickedness, you need to look at drug testing in Africa and how that works. Not to say the pharmaceutical industry does not also save lives, but it’s a huge money industry and with that comes corruptive drift, let us say. So he wrote into that space, and people say, rightly, that it was prophetic, incisive, and so on.

But the thing that I want to say all the time is that he was fun, and he was mischievous. When you read these books, you get rippling moments of laughter which can catch you by surprise, and those moments indicate more what it was like to be with him in the day to day than I think people realise.

They assume he was a very serious, very angry fellow. But he was impish and joyous and hilarious to be around. Recently I’ve started saying that out loud, lest we forget that.