Smiley’s People (Dramatised)

Product Description John le Carre’s classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him — and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley — unprecedented worldwide acclaim. Rounding off his astonishing vision of a clandestine world, master storyteller le Carre perfects his art in “Smiley’s People.” In London at dead of night, George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Circus (aka the British Secret Service), is summoned from his lonely bed by news of the murder of an ex-agent. Lured back to active service, Smiley skillfully maneuvers his people — “the no-men of no-man’s land” — into crisscrossing Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland as he prepares for his own final, inevitable duel on the Berlin border with his Soviet counterpart and archenemy, Karla. Review Chicago TribuneA splendid spy story…a fine narrative, a delight to read, intricate, exciting, absorbing. — Review From AudioFile The BBC’s stunning dramatization of le Carre’s works reaches a conclusion with SMILEY’S PEOPLE, the wrap to the trilogy that pits Smiley against Russian superspy Karla. The story begins with the death of the retired spy Vladimir, an event that drags Smiley himself out of retirement and sets him on a journey that will try his wits and will. Simon Russell Beale is nuanced and deft as Smiley, playing a hard and driven spy while revealing through internal monologue his vulnerable and uncertain inner self. Condensing such a rich novel into three hours is no small feat, and the BBC delivers with outstanding richness. A gem of the genre. F.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine About the Author John le CarrE was born in 1931. 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 Honorable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People. His novels include The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, Our Game, The Taileor of Panama, and Single & Single. John le CarrE lives in Cornwall. Excerpt. (c) Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Smiley from his dubious retirement. The first had for its background Paris, and for a season the boiling month of August, when Parisians by tradition abandon their city to the scalding sunshine and the bus-loads of packaged tourists. On one of these August days — the fourth, and at twelve o’clock exactly, for a church clock was chiming and a factory bell had just preceded it — in a quartier once celebrated for its large population of the poorer Russian emigres, a stocky woman of about fifty, carrying a shopping bag, emerged from the darkness of an old warehouse and set off, full of her usual energy and purpose, along the pavement to the bus-stop. The street was grey and narrow, and shuttered, with a couple of small hotels de passe and a lot of cats. It was a place, for some reason, of peculiar quiet. The warehouse, since it handled perishable goods, had remained open during the holidays. The heat, fouled by exhaust fumes and unwashed by the slightest breeze, rose at her like the heat from a lift-shaft, but her Slavic features registered no complaint. She was neither dressed nor built for exertion on a hot day, being in stature very short indeed, and fat, so that she had to roll a little in order to get along. Her black dress, of ecclesiastical severity, possessed neither a waist nor any other relief except for a dash of white lace at the neck and a large metal cross, well fingered but of no intrinsic value, at the bosom. Her cracked shoes, which in walking tended outwards at the points, set a stern tattoo rattling between the shuttered houses. Her shabby bag, full since early morning, gave her a slight s