This is a cold-war thriller inspired by the building of the Berlin Wall. Alex Leamas had been spying for his British masters during the 1960s in Berlin and was disillusioned by the number of good agents murdered for the cause. He is given one final assignment before he was to return to London for good. He needed to penetrate deep into East Germany, and in the course of his travels befriends a young woman. George Smiley is also involved in the young woman and the whole mission becomes deeply dangerous.
David John Moore Cornwall, aka John Le Carre, was born in 1931, educated in Oxford, taught at Eton and was then recruited by the Foreign Office. The book was the author's first commercial success, with a gritty, dangerous spy thriller with political overtones. His first thriller, 'Call for the Dead', published two years earlier, then found an audience as he had the reputation of a fine story teller.