A Legacy of Spies

[A] late-career triumph

1843 Magazine

[As] labyrinthine as you'd expect ... le Carré has always been a master

The Tablet

[Le Carré's] writing has lost none of its pith or potency . . . his powers of invention have kept up with the pace of an ever-changing and complex world'

The Scotsman

Deeply moving in its portrait of a man adrift in a climate he no longer understands

Metro

George Smiley is our favourite fictional spy

Sunday Express

His writing is as crisp as ever . . . another tale of intrigue which will slip effortlessly into its place in the Smiley canon

Daily Express

Ingenious

Washington Post

le Carré has made and peopled a myth. Myths do not age

Financial Times

Razor-sharp insight from the battle-weary Guillam and fascinating glimpses into the murky spycraft at the height of the Cold War only add to the joy of this sublimely accomplished thriller

The People

The literary event of the Autumn

Evening Standard

Thrilling and fascinating - a satisfying close to the saga

The Independent

Utterly engrossing and perfectly pitched, it is a triumph

Daily Mail

We are back in the more interesting territory of moral uncertainty and failure. What, Smiley asks, was he fighting for?

TLS

A Legacy of Spies deploys a complex and ingeniously layered structure to make the past alive in the present once more . . . le Carré has not lost his touch

Evening Standard

A literary master for a generation

Observer

He can communicate emotion, from sweating fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all, he can tell a tale. Formidable equipment for a rare and disturbing writer

Sunday Times

I have re-read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold over and over again since I first encountered it in my teens, just to remind myself how extraordinary a work of fiction can be

Malcolm Gladwell

Gripping, fast-paced . . . A splendid novel

Andrew Marr, Sunday Times

It's brilliantly done and very enjoyable

Prospect

le Carré's masterful new novel

Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian

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

The best spy story I have ever read

Graham Greene on The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

The English canon has rarely seen an acclaimed novelist and popular entertainer sustain such a hot streak in old age . . . A Legacy of Spies achieves many things. Outstandingly, it is a defiant assertion of creative vigour

The Observer

This is a truly wonderful, morally complex, politically astute novel written with elegance and panache . . . the visceral thrill of its twists and its complexities, its edge-of-the-seat qualities

Scotland on Sunday

It gives the reader, at long last, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been missing for 54 years . . . A Legacy of Spies does something remarkable . . . Like wine, le Carré's writing has got richer with age

The Times

This really is vintage le Carré

Mail on Sunday

This sublime thriller

Sunday Mirror

Not since The Spy Who Came in From The Cold has le Carré exercised his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such thrilling effect

John Banville, Guardian

What are we to make of Smiley? What is his game? Do we like him? Admire him? Every le Carré reader has wrestled with these questions-and A Legacy of Spies brings them to the fore more directly than any previous book

Vanity Fair

A brilliant novel of deception, love and trust to join his supreme espionage canon

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

A splendid novel

Sunday Times

An immensely clever piece of novelistic engineering

Guardian