The Spy Who Came In From The Cold; Call For The Dead; A Murder Of Quality; The Looking-Glass War; A Small Town In Germany
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Few names in twentieth-century fiction carry the weight and moral gravity of John le Carré, and this definitive omnibus — complete and unabridged — gathers five of his most celebrated Cold War masterworks into a single essential volume. Beginning with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, widely regarded as the greatest spy novel ever written, the collection traces the world of George Smiley through Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, before widening its lens to the shadowy institutional machinery of The Looking-Glass War and the labyrinthine political intrigue of A Small Town in Germany. Together, these novels chart a post-war Britain riddled with disillusionment, moral compromise, and the quiet brutality of state-sanctioned deception. Le Carré's genius lies not in the pyrotechnics of action, but in the suffocating atmosphere of bureaucratic cynicism and human frailty he constructs with surgical precision. His prose is measured, ice-cold, and devastatingly ironic — a world away from the glamour of Bond, and all the more chilling for it. Each story argues, with unflinching clarity, that the machinery of espionage corrodes the very values it purports to defend. For readers who have yet to encounter le Carré's morally complex universe, this volume is an unmissable entry point; for those who know it well, it remains an indispensable companion.
Author: John Le Carré
Format: Hardback
Published: 1979, Heinemann/Octopus
Genre: Cold war & espionage
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Few names in twentieth-century fiction carry the weight and moral gravity of John le Carré, and this definitive omnibus — complete and unabridged — gathers five of his most celebrated Cold War masterworks into a single essential volume. Beginning with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, widely regarded as the greatest spy novel ever written, the collection traces the world of George Smiley through Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, before widening its lens to the shadowy institutional machinery of The Looking-Glass War and the labyrinthine political intrigue of A Small Town in Germany. Together, these novels chart a post-war Britain riddled with disillusionment, moral compromise, and the quiet brutality of state-sanctioned deception. Le Carré's genius lies not in the pyrotechnics of action, but in the suffocating atmosphere of bureaucratic cynicism and human frailty he constructs with surgical precision. His prose is measured, ice-cold, and devastatingly ironic — a world away from the glamour of Bond, and all the more chilling for it. Each story argues, with unflinching clarity, that the machinery of espionage corrodes the very values it purports to defend. For readers who have yet to encounter le Carré's morally complex universe, this volume is an unmissable entry point; for those who know it well, it remains an indispensable companion.