Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

George Smiley is one of the most brilliantly realized characters in British fiction. Bespectacled, tubby, eternally middle-aged and deceptively ordinary, he has a mind like a steel trap and is said to possess “the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.” Smiley has come out of retirement. Moscow has infiltrated a mole into the Circus and it’s more than likely the perpetrator is Karla, his old adversary. And when Smiley is offered the job of catching the mole, it becomes a long and bitter battle of deception and treachery.

San Francisco Chronicle

A rattling good novel.

Any spy novelist working today must contend with the legacy of John le Carré, and it's a rare author who earns comparison with the master. Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and his trilogy starring British intelligence hero George Smiley and nemesis "Karla" are classics of Cold War literature, but the closing of that era has not left le Carré at loose ends: His later novels have departed for new milieus with no sacrifice of intrigue.