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Our Kind of Traitor

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241967850

  • Length: 400  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 28mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 369g

  • RRP: £8.99

Our Kind of Traitor

In John le Carré's electrifying novel Our Kind of Traitor, innocents abroad are drawn into the darkest recesses of the financial world.

Britain is in the depths of recession. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula and a diamond-encrusted gold watch. He also has a tattoo on his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis.

What else he wants propels the young lovers on a tortuous journey through Paris to a safe house in the Swiss Alps, to the murkiest cloisters of the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's Intelligence Establishment.

'If you want to know about the state of Britain today, forget the Booker shortlist. Just read John le Carré's latest thriller' Evening Standard

'Few recent plays have had dialogue as good, and few recent literary novels can boast a set of characters so vividly imagined. Our Kind of Traitor is a teasing, beguiling, masterly performance' Sunday Times

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241967850

  • Length: 400  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 28mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 369g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • A remarkable book by the master. Reading it is a great experience

    Henning Mankell, Daily Telegraph

  • A compelling tale of deceit, dialogue and the author's own despair . . . This is a story with frenzy at its heart

    James Naughtie, Daily Telegraph

  • John le Carré's bullet train of a new thriller is part vintage John le Carré and part Alfred Hitchcock . . . The author's most thrilling thriller in years

    The New York Times

  • If you want to know about the state of Britain today, forget the Booker shortlist. Just read John le Carré's latest thriller

    Evening Standard

  • Few recent plays have had dialogue as good, and few recent literary novels can boast a set of characters so vividly imagined. Our Kind of Traitor is a teasing, beguiling, masterly performance

    Sunday Times

  • A compelling tale of deceit, dialogue and the author's own despair John le Carré's greatest gift may be his ear, which allows him to pick up a tremor of fear in the softest voice or a false note in any exchange of words and play with them to his heart's content. He can therefore create, in dialogue, a trembling soundscape that has a pitch-perfect quality

    Sunday Telegraph

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About the Author

John le Carré

John le Carré was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on 12 December 2020.

John le Carré

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Recommendations

Where to start reading John le Carré books

His death this week marked the end of a career which produced internationally acclaimed novels in every decade from the 1960s onwards. Le Carré’s work was enjoyed by readers and critics alike and adapted multiple times for film and television, making him one of the most celebrated and influential authors of modern times. But where to start if you’re new to this work? Here is our starter for ten.
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Features

Florence Pugh reads The Little Drummer Girl

Alongside Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Shannon, Florence Pugh stars in The Little Drummer Girl, the latest adaptation of John le Carré’s thrilling novel of espionage and betrayal. Here she reads le Carré’s description of the character that she herself plays in the BBC series.
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Extracts

The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre

In this extract from The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré describes the accusations of disloyalty he faced from former Secret Service colleagues - and how Alec Guinness used them in his portrayal of George Smiley

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