A Delicate Truth
  • Published: 2 January 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241965177
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

A Delicate Truth

Formats & editions
Paperback
25 Jun 2014
Hardback
1 Nov 2022
EBook
2 Jan 2014
Audiobook
25 Apr 2013
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THE paperback of 2014 - outstanding reviews, huge coverage, le Carré's most compelling novel in years

A counter-terror operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted in Britain's most precious colony, Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, and a private defence contractor who is also his close friend. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister's Private Secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.

Suspecting a disastrous conspiracy, Toby attempts to forestall it, but is promptly posted overseas. Three years on, summoned by Sir Christopher Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely watched by Probyn's daughter Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and his duty to the Service.

If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?
  • Published: 2 January 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241965177
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
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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. His posthumous novel Silverview was published in 2021.

portrait photo of John le Carré

Also by John le Carré

Call for the Dead
Silverview
A Perfect Spy
The Pigeon Tunnel
A Private Spy
The Russia House
The Little Drummer Girl
See all

Praise for A Delicate Truth

Perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain . . . He should have won the Booker Prize a long time ago. It's time he won it and it's time he accepted it. He's in the first rank.

Ian McEwan, Telegraph

No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his times, from the Second World War to the "War on Terror"

Guardian

One of those writers who will be read a century from now

Robert Harris

With A Delicate Truth, le Carré has in a sense come home. And it's a splendid homecoming . . . Satisfying, subtle and compelling

The Times

The perfectly paced, exquisitely cynical style that is le Carré's hallmark

Sunday Times

The master of the modern spy novel returns . . . this is writing of such quality that - as Robert Harris put it - it will be read in one hundred years

Daily Mail

A brilliant climax, with sinister deaths, casual torture, wrecked lives and shameful compromises

Observer

A writer of towering gifts . . . le Carré is one of the great analysts of the contemporary scene, who has a talent to provoke as well as unsettle

Independent

John le Carré takes us back to his favourite scenarios: Whitehall, the secret services, the gentleman's clubs, dodgy bankers, corrupt public schoolboys and gruesome American neo-cons . . . revelling once more in that imaginary world of secrets and lies that is le Carré's gift to us

Evening Standard

Thrilling, suspenseful . . . Fans will not be disappointed

Sunday Express

Utterly convincing characters, a tight plot . . . Wonderful

Sunday Mirror

Thrilling

Express

Choreographed with unsettling precision

Metro

When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carré ... they were a journey into the wider world ... These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind

Aung San Suu Kyi

Plunges the reader into a modern-day thriller...Dad won't be able to put it down

Metro

[It] has all the essential ingredients of his masterpieces: the dilemmas of duty, patriotism and decency

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Metro 'Books of the Year'

John Le Carré at his masterful best . . . nobody does it better

Ben Macintyre, The Times 'Books of the Year'

Widely hailed as a return to the good old Smiley days . . . le Carré writes with laconic elegance

Kate Saunders, The Times 'Books of the Year'