from: Walker & Company
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780802714541
ISBN number: 0802714544
Label: Walker & Company
Manufacturer: Walker & Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: September 01, 2005
Publishing house: Walker & Company
Release Date: August 11, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 36838
Studio: Walker & Company
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A new hardcover edition of the book Graham Greene called “the best spy story I have ever read.”
On its publication in 1964, John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carré combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced, which transports anyone who reads it back to the shadowy years in the early 1960s, when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War came to life.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was hailed as a classic as soon as it was published, and it remains one today.
Amazon.com:
It would be an international crime to reveal too much of the jeweled clockwork plot of Le Carré's very first masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But we are at liberty to disclose that Graham Greene called it the 'finest spy story ever written,' and that the taut tale concerns Alec Leamas, a British agent in early Cold War Berlin. Leamas is responsible for keeping the double agents under his care undercover and alive, but East Germans start killing them, so he gets called back to London by Control, his spy master. Yet instead of giving Leamas the boot, Control gives him a scary assignment: play the part of a disgraced agent, a sodden failure everybody whispers about. Control sends him back out into the cold--deep into Communist territory to checkmate the bad-guy spies on the other side. The political chessboard is grey and white, but in human terms the vicinity of the Berlin Wall is a moral no-man's land, a gray abyss patrolled by pawns.
Le Carré beats most spy writers for two reasons. First, he knows what he's talking about, since he raced around working for British Intelligence while the Wall went up. He's familiar with spycraft's fascinations, but also with the fact that it leaves ideals shaken and emotions stirred. Second, his literary tone has deep autobiographical roots. Spying is about betrayal, and Le Carré was abandoned by his mother and betrayed by his father, a notorious con man. (They figure heavily in his novels Single & Single and A Perfect Spy.) In a world of lies, Le Carré writes the bitter truth: it's every man for himself. And may the best mask win. --Tim Appelo
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Well if you never read a spy novel like myself then this would be a perfect entry point. First the positives the book was great because it was not so long the book was 224 pages so if you have a couple of hours to kill or on an airplane then this would be a perfect book to read and it was great because it dealt with the cold war era which is pretty interesting stuff.
The negative would be is that it is an old book but a good book certain british lingo such as macintosh meaning raincoat is something we americans would not understand but overall it was a great book and the lingo was not too bad that it confused anyone that read it. I was hoping for a happier ending but I was bitterly disappointed with what did transpired at the end but the book did keep me interested so overall I was happy.
Rated by buyers -
Recommended by a Washington Post article, this book does not disappoint. It starts off with action in Berlin then spins a web of deceit and lies that keep the reader engrossed. We follow our main character through twists and turns and in different countries. The climax? Completely out of left-field. Shocking. As I finished the book, I sat and started at the ending for a good five minutes.
Buy this book! A great summer read. A great weekend read. Worthy of a space on your bookshelf.
Rated by buyers 
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There is no question that Le Carre casts a unique plot with this book, and he keeps his spies very much on the human side. He lets us into his characters' thoughts without giving anything away and they are not cartoonish. Although it is complelling, it becomes more of a puzzle and a history lesson about the cold war in the 60s than a genuine work of lasting literary value. Le Carre can write an amazing sentence now and then, but a story so locked into the circumstances of the day it was written in creaks with a bit of rust after 44 years. There are certain scenes and certain turns of phrase that put me off just a dash with their aged presentation, but I am old enough to remember the Berlin Wall and the machinations of both sides of the conflict, and it is a bit nostalgic to remember what things were like in the spy game before computers, satellites and cell phones. Le Carre doesn't put his heroes through the ringer the way his contemporary Alistair MacLean did, but he can write suspensefully, and ultimately this novel satisfies the need for a good yarn, as well as challenging the reader to figure out what's going on before the book's hero does. The anticommunist preachiness that creeps in is also a bit much in light of the time that has passed and what has happened in the meantime, but that goes by fairly quickly. It borders on melodrama without taking that final leap, but some of the dialog suffers all the same. It's a great taste of a bygone era of history, and of writing, and should be read as that. If you're looking for the cutting edge of spy fiction, this book lies at the other end of the scale. Anyone who writes a spy story owes Le Carre a debt for being one of the progenitors, but he didn't quite cross into literature territory the way Maughm did with the
Ashendon stories.
Rated by buyers -
I haven't read many spy novels, but if they are like this book, I'd like to read more of them. The book's asset is its authenticity. A classic. If you are looking for some James Bond fun, look elsewhere.
Rated by buyers -
I had heard good things about this book, but I'm sad to say I had never heard that it is as good as it is. This is a phenomenal book, that doesn't cheap out at the end. It's told is a colder, more impersonal style that really fits the story--sets the mood and all. This book is on my definite must read. You should own this book.
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