John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (UK 2020)

From the Publisher:
The eighth of John le Carré's espionage novels to feature his most enduring and well-loved character, George Smiley, The Secret Pilgrim is a gripping feat of narrative brilliance.

The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that took him from the Western Isles of Scotland to Hamburg and from Israel to Cambodia. He asks himself: Did it do any good? What did it do to me? And what will happen to us now? In this late Smiley novel, the great spy gives his own humane and unexpected answers.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780241337189 (March, 2020), 416 p., £14.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (UK 2020)

From the Publisher:
THE EIGHTH GEORGE SMILEY NOVEL
The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that took him from the Western Isles of Scotland to Hamburg and from Israel to Cambodia. He asks himself: Did it do any good? What did it do to me? And what will happen to us now? In this late Smiley novel, the great spy gives his own humane and unexpected answers.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780241330944 (February, 2020), 416 p., £7.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (USA 2017)

From the Publisher:
The acclaimed novel featuring George Smiley, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies and The Night Manager, now an AMC miniseries

The rules of the game, and of the world, have changed. Old enemies now yield to glasnost and perestroika. The killing shadows of the Cold War are flooded with light. The future is unfathomable.

To train new spies for this uncertain future, one must show them the past. Enter the man called Ned, the loyal and shrewd veteran of the Circus. With the inspiration of his inscrutable mentor George Smiley, Ned thrills all as he recounts forty exhilarating years of Cold War espionage across Europe and the Far East -- an electrifying, clandestine tour of honorable old knights and notorious traitors, triumph and failure, passion and hate, suspicion, sudden death, and old secrets that haunt us still.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. A Novel. Ballantine, ISBN: 9781524797621 (August, 2017), eBook, 2.21 MB (ca. 400 p.=, $12.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (UK 2011)

From the Publisher:
The last of John le Carré's espionage novels to feature his most enduring and well-loved character, George Smiley, and a gripping feat of narrative brilliance, The Secret Pilgrim is published in Penguin Modern Classics with an afterword by the author.

The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that took him from the Western Isles of Scotland to Hamburg and from Israel to Cambodia. He asks himself: Did it do any good? What did it do to me? And what will happen to us now?

In this final Smiley novel, the great spy gives his own humane and unexpected answers. If you enjoyed The Secret Pilgrim, you might like le Carré's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN: 9780141196367 (May, 2011), 409 p., £9.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (UK 2009)

From the Publisher:
The Berlin Wall is toppled, the Iron Curtain swept aside. The Secret Pilgrim is Ned, a decent, loyal soldier of the Cold War, who has been in British Intelligence all his adult life. Now, approaching the end of his career, he is forced by the explosions of change to revisit his secret years. He illuminates the brave past and even braver present of George Smiley, his hero and mentor, who gives back to him the dangerous edge of memory that empowers him finally to frame the questions that have haunted him - and the world - for thirty years...

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. A George Smiley Novel. Sceptre, ISBN: 9780340993798 (November, 2009), 408 p., £7.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (USA 2008)

From the Publisher:
The acclaimed novel featuring George Smiley, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies and The Night Manager, now an AMC miniseries

The rules of the game, and of the world, have changed. Old enemies now yield to glasnost and perestroika. The killing shadows of the Cold War are flooded with light. The future is unfathomable.

To train new spies for this uncertain future, one must show them the past. Enter the man called Ned, the loyal and shrewd veteran of the Circus. With the inspiration of his inscrutable mentor George Smiley, Ned thrills all as he recounts forty exhilarating years of Cold War espionage across Europe and the Far East -- an electrifying, clandestine tour of honorable old knights and notorious traitors, triumph and failure, passion and hate, suspicion, sudden death, and old secrets that haunt us still.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. A Novel. Ballantine, ISBN: 9780345504425 (April, 2008), 382 p., $16.00.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (UK 2001)

From the Publisher:
Evidence suggests Soviet missiles being put in place close to the German border, while a film has gone missing and a courier is dead. Fred Leiser, once a qualified radio-operator, now something in the London motor trade, must be called back to the colours and sent East in John le Carre's thrilling classic.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 0340733683 (August, 2001), 348 p., £17.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (UK 1994)

From the Publisher:
The Berlin Wall is toppled, the Iron Curtain swept aside. The Secret Pilgrim is Ned, a decent, loyal soldier of the Cold War, who has been in British Intelligence all his adult life. Now, approaching the end of his career, he is forced by the explosions of change to revisit his secret years. He illuminates the brave past and even braver present of George Smiley, his hero and mentor, who gives back to him the dangerous edge of memory that empowers him finally to frame the questions that have haunted him - and the world - for thirty years...

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 0340552050 (October, 1994), 352 p., £5.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (USA 1992)

From the Publisher:
The Cold War is over. The rules of the spying game have changed. But to train new spies for this uncertain future, one must first show them the past. Enter the man called Ned, the loyal and shrewd veteran of the Circus. With the inspiration of his inscrutable mentor George Smiley, Ned thrills all as he recounts forty exhilarating years of Cold War espionage across Europe and the Far East.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. Ballantine, ISBN: 0345374762 (February, 1992), 352 p., $5.99.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim (UK 1991)

From the Publisher:
FOR THE PAST THIRTY YEARS John le Carré has delighted his readership with a comedie humaine of the secret world, which always reflected the contemporary scene, and sometimes eerily predicted it. Thus, before the Cold War had officially ended, he was giving us The Russia House, which not only foresaw the total demise of the Iron Curtain but triumphantly heralded the era of glasnost.

In The Secret Pilgrim, le Carré nimbly contrives to look both forward and backward at the same time. Who were we in those Cold War years? he asks - and what will we become now that the conventional cliches ofhostility have been swept away?

He gives us a past defined by Before the Fall and After the Fall, and the Fall was the unmasking of the master traitor Bill Haydon.

He gives us a future perhaps equally dangerous, waiting to be written. The questions are posed, in part, by Ned - surname unknown - whose final task in the evening of his long intelligence career is to train the new generation of men and women who will take their places as tomorrow's spies. At the passing-out dinner at the close of their training course, Ned is spurred into asentimental joumey through his own life, from recruitment to imminent retirement. The result, for the reader, is a dazzling array of recollections, part comic, part tragic, part futile - each one of them a milestone along the secret pilgrim's joumey.

The questions are answered - glancingly, elusively, sometimes with a delphic ambiguity - by George Smiley, whom Ned has invited as his guest of honour for the occasion - George, the oldest and canniest Cold Warrior of them all who, having presided over Ned's career, now presides over this fabled feast of memories and glittering, if deluded, future hopes.

In this book lies real magic. Subliminal magic. Magic of the moment. The magic of an awkward world haltingly accepting its singleness, and looking back on its divisions. The magic of an uncharted future beckoning to an overburdened past. To mix his magic, le Carré sprinkles a host of splendid new characters among the old knights of his own writing past: George Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Bill Haydon and Ned of the Russia House among many others - each has his hour and takes his final bow in this pageant of the ever-changing, never-ending secret world, which in le Carré's hands is merely the inmost room of our overt lives.

The Secret Pilgrim holds us entranced by its story-telling genius. It is John le Carré's most magnificent novel.

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim. Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN: 0340543817 (January, 1991), 352 p., £14.95.