Reviews:
Library Journal Review
A young Russian named Issa, smuggled into Hamburg and claiming he's Muslim. Annabel, the civil rights lawyer trying to stop his deportation. And British banker Tommy Brue, to whom Annabel turns for help. Everyone is after them in le Carre's latest. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
Publishers Weekly Review
When boxer Melik Oktay and his mother, both Turkish Muslims living in Hamburg, take in a street person calling himself Issa at the start of this morally complex thriller from le CarrE (The Mission Song), they set off a chain of events implicating intelligence agencies from three countries. Issa, who claims to be a Muslim medical student, is, in fact, a wanted terrorist and the son of Grigori Karpov, a Red Army colonel whose considerable assets are concealed in a mysterious portfolio at a Hamburg bank. Tommy Brue, a stereotypical flawed everyman caught up in the machinations of spies and counterspies, enters the plot when Issa's attorney seeks to claim these assets. The book works best in its depiction of the rivalries besetting even post-9/11 intelligence agencies that should be allies, but none of the characters is as memorable as George Smiley or Magnus Pym. Still, even a lesser le CarrE effort is far above the common run of thrillers. (Oct.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
Washington Post Book World
“Le Carre’s strength is his plotting, his prose, the sharpness of its detail, the marvelous precision of his ear, and the authenticity of his charactersl”
Author’s web page: http://www.johnlecarre.com/index.php
Interview with the Author; watch him talk about the book: http://www.johnlecarre.com/mostwantedman.php
Let me tell you a few things about myself. Not much, but enough. In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind. I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.
I never knew my mother till I was 21. I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born. My father was a confidence trickster and a gaol bird. Read A Perfect Spy.
I hate the telephone. I can't type. I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don't see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink.
Apart from spying, I have in my time sold bathtowels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a twenty-five pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer's instructions, taught children in a special school.
I have four sons and twelve grandchildren. It is forty years since I hung up my cloak and dagger. I wrote my first three books while I was a spook; I wrote the next eighteen after I was at large.
A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.
And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.
Author Notes:
David John Moore Cornwell writes bestselling espionage thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré. The pseudonym was necessary when he began writing, in the early 1960s, because at that time le Carré held a diplomatic position with the British Foreign Office and was not allowed to publish under his own name.
Originally inspired to write intrigue because of a 1950s scandal that revealed several highly-placed members of the British Foreign Office and Secret Service to be Soviet agents, or "moles," the plots of most of le Carré's books revolve around Cold War espionage. His own position with the Foreign Office, as well as his earlier service with the British Army Intelligence Corps, gave him an intimate knowledge of Britain's espionage bureaucracy and of Cold War politics.
When his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller in 1964, le Carré left the foreign service to write full time. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was also adapted to film, featured spymaster George Smiley, who was introduced in le Carré's first book, Call for the Dead (published in the U.S. as The Deadly Affair) and also appears in A Murder of Quality; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People.
Le Carré has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (1986), and the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association (1988). In addition to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, several of his other books have been adapted for television and motion pictures, including The Russia House, a 1990 film starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, and 2005's The Constant Gardener.
Le Carré was born in Poole, Dorsetshire, England in 1931. He attended Bern University in Switzerland from 1948-49 and later completed a B.A. at Lincoln College, Oxford in 1956. Married twice, he has four sons: Simon, Stephen, Timothy, and Nicholas.
(Bowker Author Biography) John le Carre was born in 1931. After attending the univesities of Berne and Oxford, he spent five years in the British Foreign Service. He's the author of eighteen novels, translated into twenty-five languages. He lives in England. [from MCLD catalog].
