A Delicate Truth
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A counterterrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office minister, a private defence contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far right. So delicate is the operation that even the minister's private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.
Three years later, a disgraced special forces soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be--or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher "Kit" Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house and closely observed by Kit's daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?
About this Author
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, in MI5 and MI6. 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 December 12, 2020.
Reviews
"At the moment a new generation is stumbling upon his work, le Carré is still writing at something close to the top of his game.... [A Delicate Truth] has a gently flickering love story and jangling ending. And le Carré has not lost his ability to sketch, in a line or two, an entire character." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times Magazine
"Le Carré is back at full power with a book that draws on a career's worth of literary skill and international analysis.... 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.'" --The Guardian
"The bewitching nuances of [le Carré] are all there, for this is writing of such quality that--as Robert Harris puts it--it will be read in one hundred years. Le Carré was never a spy-turned-writer, he was a writer who found his canvas in espionage, as Dickens did in other worlds. The two men deserve comparison." --Daily Mail (UK)
"Le Carré is as recognisable a writer as Dickens or Austen, with an often-imitated but never rivalled cast of seedy spies, false lovers, public schoolboys struggling with guilt, and charming but immoral leaders of the brutal establishment. Here he is again at 81, with his baroque characters and moral disgust intact in A Delicate Truth.... This is vintage [le Carré] and highly enjoyable. He is the master of the tightly crafted, interlocked plot, with characters who blow smoke, cause trouble and have chaotic affairs." --Financial Times (UK)
"I think he has easily burst out of being a genre writer and will be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain. He will have charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has.... He's in the first rank." --Ian McEwan, winner of the Booker Prize
"As another exercise in the patented [le Carré] formula for espionage novels, it succeeds admirably--the narrative drive and the workings of suspense are very strong and never let up. The language is crisp, the details not excessive for the most part, the occasional tip for armchair sleuths enlightening ... we can still be grateful for what we have in such well-crafted specimens of [le Carré's] art as A Delicate Truth." --National Post
"Le Carré is now 81, but his writing is as fresh and perceptive as ever ... This is a very fine book. Read it as a thriller. Read it as a tract for our times. In either case you will not be disappointed." --Waterloo Region Record
"The narrative dominoes fall with masterly precision.... As ever, le Carré's prose is fluid, carrying the reader toward an inevitable yet nail-biting climax." --Olen Steinhauer, The New York Times Book Review
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