The spy who came in from the cold

On its publication In 1964, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carré combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced, which transports us back to the shadowy years in the early 1960s when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War came to life. When the last agent under his command is killed in Berlin, Alec Leamas, weary and disillusioned, is called back to London by his spymaster, Control, hoping to finally come in from the cold. Instead, Control has one last assignment for Leamas: to adopt the role of a disgraced agent and return behind the Iron Curtain as bait to bring down the head of East German intelligence. Layering plot over plot, le Carré reveals a dirty game of betrayal and assumed identity in which individuals are expendable and neither side is honorable. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was hailed as a classic as soon as it was published. With an illuminating new foreword by bestselling author Joseph Kanon, it remains one today.