Our Game: A Novel

John Le Carré

Knopf, 1995 - Fiction - 301 pages

At Forty-Eight, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in premature retirement to deepest rural England. His Cold War is fought and won, and he is free to devote himself to his stately manor house, his vineyard, and his beautiful young mistress, Emma. But no man can escape his past, and Tim's lives twenty miles away, in the chaotic person of Larry Pettifer: bored radical don, philanderer, and for twenty years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanquished Communist threat. Between the two stands an unresolved rivalry that dates all the way back to their shared boyhood at public school. As the story opens, Larry and Emma have disappeared. Have they run off together? Are they lovers? Has Larry lured Emma into some dark game she cannot understand? Setting off in pursuit of them, Tim discovers that he too is being pursued, by his former masters. The hunter becomes the hunted. Raiding his own past like a thief, he follows Larry and Emma into the minefield - physical and emotional - of their new allegiance. And as Tim advances across the moral wastes of post-Cold War Europe - the battered landscape of England after Thatcher, the lawless worlds of Moscow and Southern Russia - his dilemma deepens. Finding himself deprived of both past and future, a dispossessed loyalist, he must grapple with his own leftover humanity as the values he fought to preserve fall away, and the spectre of the reinvented Russian empire begins to haunt the ruins of the Soviet dream. Our Game is John le Carre at his incomparable best.

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 24
• Section 3: 47

About the author

David John Moore Cornwell was born in Poole, Dorsetshire, England in 1931. He attended Bern University in Switzerland from 1948-49 and later completed a B.A. at Lincoln College, Oxford. He taught at Eton from 1956-58 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. He writes espionage thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré. The pseudonym was necessary when he began writing, in the early 1960s because, at that time, he held a diplomatic position with the British Foreign Office and was not allowed to publish under his own name. When his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a worldwide bestseller in 1964, he left the foreign service to write full time. His other works include Call for the Dead; A Murder of Quality; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986 and the Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in 1988. In 2011 he accepted the Goethe Medal. And in 2020, he accepted the Olof Palme Prize. Ten of his books have been adapted for television and motion pictures including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Russia House, The Constant Gardener, A Most Wanted Man, and Our Kind of Traitor. Le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life, became a New York Times bestseller in 2016. In 2019, he published a spy thriller, Agent Running in the Field. John Le Carré died on December 12, 2020 from pneumonia at the age of 89.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Our Game: A Novel; A Borzoi book; George Smiley Novels Series; John Lecarre novel
• Author: John Le Carré
• Publisher: Knopf, 1995
• ISBN: 0679441891, 9780679441892
• Length: 301 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Psychological; Fiction / Thrillers / Espionage; Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense