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The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is British author John Le Carre’s 1963 spy novel set in the cold war era, and narrates a tale of espionage, intrigue, and suspense, involving British secret agent Alec Leamas, on his final assignment in East Germany. Summary Of The Book The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is an explosive tale of espionage, featuring one of its primary characters from John Le Carre’s debut novel Call For The Dead namely, Hans-Dieter Mundt who now heads the East German Secret Service, the Abteilung. The book’s leading protagonist is Alec Leamus, a secret agent who works for the British Secret Intelligence Service (known as the Circus). He is in charge of East German espionage and stationed at West Berlin managing a department that has not been faring well in recent times. With the death of his final agent serving as the last straw, he gets called to London by Control, the chief of the Circus. He is then instructed about his final assignment, for which, he must turn himself in, and convince the East Germans that Mundt is a double agent, working for the British secret service. He is further briefed by the supposedly retired spy George Smiley and his assistant, Peter Guillam, and learns that Smiley had decided to stay removed from the Circus because of his moral reservations about the ethics of an earlier Circus operation. As part of the plan, Leamas is sacked from his job, after which he picks up an ordinary job at a library. Here, he meets and falls in love with a coworker named Liz Gold. When he finally departs on his mission, he makes her promise not to look for him under any circumstances. As Alec makes his way into treacherous communist Germany, under the orders of his British masters, he has little idea about the dangers awaiting him in a ruthlessly amoral world of espionage, where nothing is as it seemed. Hailed the ‘best spy novel of all-time’, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was a huge international bestseller, aptly describing the military and political tensions during the cold war. It won multiple awards including the Gold Dagger award in 1963, and was named as one of TIME Magazine’s All-Time 100 Novels. In 1965, the book was adapted into a film version starring Richard Burton. About John Le Carre David John Moore Cornwell who wrote under the pen name John Le Carre, is a former British Intelligence officer and renowned novelist. He has written many bestselling novels including, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, A Murder Of Quality, The Constant Gardener, The Little Drummer Girl, and The Russia House. Born on 19th October 1931, he schooled at the St Andrew's Preparatory School, Berkshire, and University of Bern in Switzerland. In the 50s he worked covertly for the British Security Agency MI5, while pursuing higher education. He graduated with an Honours degree from Oxford University. In the following years, he worked for both MI5, and MI6, stationed in Hamburg. He also wrote novels simultaneously, which were hugely successful, earning him many awards and honors, including the Goethe Medal in 2011, and the 22nd rank in Time Magazine’s list of ‘the 50 greatest British writers since 1945’.