Smiley Versus Karla: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People

In these three masterly novels, John le Carre brings to thrilling life the shadowy battlegrounds of the Cold War — a war of ambiguous victories and hidden defeats orchestrated from the corridors of the Circus and Moscow Centre, and staffed by an army of moles and lamplighters, scalphunters and pavement artists. Stalking each other through this twilight landscape are the incomparable George Smiley and his ruthless opposite number, codenamed Karla, the Soviet case officer who has been slowly masterminding the Circus's ruin. Their extraordinary duel not only raised the spy novel to new heights of realism and complexity, it also constitutes one of the major triumphs of contemporary fiction, confirming John le Carre as a profound chronicler of the post-war world and a novelist of unfailing humanity.