The Secret Pilgrim

…We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive.

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?

Waterstones brings you 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.

'John le Carré has created a fictive world which he has made almost as familiar as that of Dickens… in terms of scope, skill and ideas, it is streets ahead of most contemporary fiction' The Daily Telegraph