A Delicate Truth
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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John le Carré
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By:
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John le Carré
About this listen
From the New York Times best-selling author of A Legacy of Spies. John le Carré’s new novel: Agent Running in the Field.
A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: To capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: An ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be - or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher “Kit” Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit’s daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?
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"A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations." (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post)
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When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead.
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A bit of a slog....
- By rhl60 on 01-26-24
By: Mick Herron
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The Eyre Affair
- A Thursday Next Novel
- By: Jasper Fforde
- Narrated by: Susan Duerden
- Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection.
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A Worthy Read
- By chicagoalum on 01-21-10
By: Jasper Fforde
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Knots and Crosses
- Inspector Rebus, Book 1
- By: Ian Rankin
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Detective John Rebus' city is being terrorized by a baffling series of murders…and he's tied to a maniac by an invisible knot of blood. As the ghoulish killings mount and the tabloid headlines scream, Rebus cannot stop the feverish shrieks from within his own mind. Because he isn't just one cop trying to catch a killer - he's the man who's got all the pieces to the puzzle…
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I've Read Mixed Reviews and Can Marry Them
- By Steve Mac on 02-13-16
By: Ian Rankin
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Amsterdam
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The best-selling author of Atonement and Enduring Love, Ian McEwan is known as one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed writers. This Booker Prize-winning novel by McEwan finds two men connecting at the funeral of their ex-lover. Distressed by how she was slowly destroyed by an illness, the two make a pact to save each other from enduring such a fate.
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Make something, and die.
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-17
By: Ian McEwan
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The Danger
- By: Dick Francis
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kidnapping is Andrew Douglas's business: they take them, he finds them. But it isn't so simple when Alessia Cenci, golden-girl jockey, disappears, followed by the young child of a derby winner and the senior steward of the Jockey Club. From Italy to England to Washington, D.C., Andrew's caseload is suddenly, violently overflowing. And he must fight triply hard to keep his own name off the growing list of victims.
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Good but disturbing
- By oseedee on 06-08-23
By: Dick Francis
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A Great Deliverance
- Inspector Lynley, Book 1
- By: Elizabeth George
- Narrated by: Donada Peters
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry".
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good debut novel
- By Stevon on 11-11-19
By: Elizabeth George
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Hero: A Simon Serrailler Short Story
- By: Susan Hill
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey
- Length: 51 mins
- Unabridged
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When Simon Serrailler was a rookie constable with the Met, he did something reckless in the course of a night's work which caused a man's death. But his act was praised by his colleagues, and he was called a hero. Years later, now a detective chief superintendent who has been badly injured in the course of duty, he receives a medal for bravery at Buckingham Palace while recollecting that fateful night of his early career, when chance disguised itself as bravery.
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This 'story' makes no sense to me
- By Pamela Donaldson on 05-10-17
By: Susan Hill
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The Jewel in the Crown
- Raj Quartet
- By: Paul Scott
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the India of 1942, two rapes take place simultaneously - that of an English girl in Mayapore, and that of India by the British. In each, physical violence, racial animosity, the coercion of the weak by the strong all play their part, but playing a part too are love, affection, loyalty, and recognition that the last division of all to be overcome is the colour of the skin.
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This is one to get
- By Jeremy on 10-28-14
By: Paul Scott
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Frozen Out
- Gunnhildur Mystery, Book 1
- By: Quentin Bates
- Narrated by: Mel Hudson
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The discovery of a corpse washed up on a beach in an Icelandic backwater sparks a series of events that propels the village of Hvalvik's police sergeant Gunnhildur into deep waters. Although under pressure to deal with the matter quickly, she is suspicious that the man's death was no accident and once she has identified the body, sets about investigating his final hours. The case takes Gunnhildur away from her village and into a cosmopolitan world of shady deals, government corruption and violence.
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Narration completely mismatched to genre and story
- By Knitosophy on 10-20-16
By: Quentin Bates
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A Spy by Nature
- A Novel
- By: Charles Cumming
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec Milius is young, smart, and ambitious. He also has a talent for deception. He is working in a dead-end job when a chance encounter leads him to MI6, the elite British Secret Intelligence Service, handing him an opportunity to play center stage in a dangerous game of espionage.
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I highly recommend this little gem
- By Chou Young on 02-14-08
By: Charles Cumming
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The Coroner
- By: M. R. Hall
- Narrated by: Sian Thomas
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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When lawyer Jenny Cooper is appointed Severn Vale District Coroner, she's hoping for a quiet life and space to recover from a traumatic divorce, but the office she inherits from the recently deceased Harry Marshall contains neglected files hiding dark secrets and a trail of buried evidence. Could the tragic death in custody of a young boy be linked to the apparent suicide of a teenage prostitute and the fate of Marshall himself?
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Best book of the year, so far.
- By karen on 05-11-13
By: M. R. Hall
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An Understated Adventure that keeps you wondering.
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Who writes “unlistenable etc. “
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The spy who came back to the bank
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Night Manager: Enter the new world of post-Cold War espionage. Penetrate the secret world of ruthless arms dealers and drug smugglers who have risen to unthinkable power and wealth. Our Game: With the Cold War fought and won, British spymaster Tim Cranmer accepts early retirement to rural England and a new life with his alluring young mistress, Emma.... Tailor of Panama: Le Carre's Panama is a Casablanca without heroes, a hotbed of drugs, laundered money and corruption. It is also the country which on December 31, 1999, will gain full control of the Panama Canal.
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you want to know what I think?
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Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the city for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian’s evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian’s family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise.
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Le Carré's SILVERVIEW brings him and us back home
- By Close Listener on 10-14-21
By: John le Carré
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The Pigeon Tunnel
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From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.
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A Global Literary Treasure
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-16
By: John le Carré
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The Russia House
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In the era of perestroika and glasnost in the USSR, a manuscript is meant to be delivered to one Bartholomew Barley Blair, a British publisher known for his eccentricity. The manuscript, penned by Russian scientist Yakov Savelyev, contains critical information detailing the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities and the state of their missile program. Except—it doesn't reach Barley. Instead, after exchanging hands several times, it ends up in the hands of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and they're quite interested in why Barley was the intended recipient of such a document.
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Great stuff!
- By John T. on 11-21-24
By: John Le Carré
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Absolute Friends
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By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer, and expatriate son of a British Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days when a cinder-block wall divided Berlin and the enemy was easy to recognize.
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Save Time and Listen. Don't read
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The Tailor of Panama
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Le Carre's Panama is a Casablanca without heroes, a hotbed of drugs, laundered money and corruption. It is also the country which on December 31, 1999, will gain full control of the Panama Canal.
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Not one of Le Carré's best
- By S. Wilson on 03-31-18
By: John le Carré
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A Small Town in Germany
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In the late 1960s, in the town of Bonn, capital of West Germany, a British Embassy officer by the name of Leo Harting goes missing—and forty-three confidential-or-higher files with him. Dispatched from the British Foreign Office to investigate, Alan Turner arrives in Bonn to find riots, protests, and a tenuous balance of power. As if there isn’t enough pressure, the embassy’s head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, makes it clear he has no intentions of making Turner’s investigation an easy one.
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Worst narrator ever
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The Mission Song
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Story
Abandoned by his parents, Bruno Salvador has long looked for guidance. He found it in Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility, Salvo (as he's known) translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, and snatched voice-mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret during a secret conference, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain--but then he hears something he should not have.
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Only a tease, a taunt of le Carré's brilliance
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By: John le Carré
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Other George Smiley Stories
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Call for the Dead (Abridged): George Smiley had liked the man and now the man was dead. But why? Fennan was dead with a note by his body saying his career was finished and he couldn’t go on. Smiley decides to investigate – only to uncover a murderous conspiracy with its roots in his own secret wartime past. A Murder of Quality (Abridged): Miss Ailsa Brimley is in a quandary. She's received a peculiar letter from Mrs Stella Rode, saying that she fears her husband is trying to kill her.
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PerfectStoryteller with Perfect Narrator
- By Steve on 07-02-22
By: John le Carré
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The Complete George Smiley Radio Dramas
- BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: full cast, Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 18 hrs and 59 mins
- Original Recording
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The complete collection of acclaimed BBC Radio dramas based on John le Carré's best-selling novels, starring Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley. With a star cast including Kenneth Cranham, Eleanor Bron, Brian Cox, Ian MacDiarmid, Anna Chancellor, Hugh Bonneville and Lindsay Duncan, these enthralling dramatisations perfectly capture the atmosphere of le Carré's taut, thrilling spy novels.
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good reading but can't navigate
- By RB Vancouver on 01-07-17
By: John le Carré
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The Naïve and Sentimental Lover
- By: John Le Carré
- Narrated by: Richard Mitchley
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Aldo Cassidy is the naive and sentimental lover. A successful, judicious man, he is wrenched away from the ordered certainties of his life by a sudden encounter with Shamus, a wild, beguiling artist and Helen, his alluring and dazzling wife.
By: John Le Carré
What listeners say about A Delicate Truth
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Paul
- 05-20-13
The Constant Gardener redux?
I really enjoy John LeCarre books. They are all so erudite. However, I have two complaints with this reading. First, the language of the British elite becomes very annoying over time and very difficult to understand for a non-Britisher. Do they really speak this way? It was almost as if LeCarre was reading at 1 1/2 speed. I even tried to listen to the book at .75 speed but it sounded ridiculous. My second complaint is that this plot seemed exactly like The Constant Gardener. It's nice to think that there are people like the protagonist who is willing to sacrifice his life for "the truth" but I find it hard to believe that a person with his experience in Government service would have stayed in this service. The fact that several innocents who are collateral damage in a botched plot would drive all of these hard bitten men to sacrifice their lives is too much to swallow. I think the statement by the "bad guy" at the end who said, "if you want to see collateral damage, watch the films of drone strikes," was really the most rational argument against the protagonist's idealistic pleadings. The plot veered to much towards a "Bourne Identity" one in that every move the protagonist made was instantly known and acted upon by the Government and its henchment and undercut LeCarre's belief that the Government was stupid and plodding. The fact implied in the book that the Government was bought and paid for by private industry and that its agents had the ability to instantaneously react to a phone call is not believable. The ultimate feeling one comes away with is that the situation is hopeless and all good mens' actions are a waste of time and they will die in the attempt to fulfill their ideals. Wasn't that the take away from The Constant Gardener?
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13 people found this helpful
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- Christopher
- 05-23-13
Le Carré just gets better and better
I didn't want this one to end. Le Carré is so refreshing after all the pointless schlock the espionage genre seems to kick out these days - mostly a contest to see how many bad guys can get blowed up in the shortest possible time. in contrast, this is an actual novel, with actual characters who actually develop! the only problem is that you'll find yourself wishing this was more like fiction and less like how the world is actually being run. if the novel doesn't make you uncomfortable, you might want to check if you still have a working conscience.
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3 people found this helpful
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- stephen mackenzie
- 11-02-23
Well done as usual
The depth of
Character is really impressive as are most all of Le carre’s novels. You need to think on this though. Not the beast to fall asleep to
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- Absolute friend
- 05-13-13
He can't write his novels fast enough for me.....
Would you listen to A Delicate Truth again? Why?
First of all, he's a marvelous reader. Usually I hate it when an author wants to read his own book, but he was great. He had accents for everyone. He just couldn't do it for women though. And the story is intricate enough to deserve a second listen. But I want more too. Write faster please.
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8 people found this helpful
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- A Reader
- 03-02-19
Le Carre is better than a professional actor
I was delighted with Mr. Le Carre's performance of his own work. His range and ability of so many voices is astonishing.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Bill
- 06-11-13
This book is on target
This is a great book and very topical for what is happening in the world today in the world on intelligence and contracting out wars
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- Thomas A. Rado, M.D.
- 12-05-16
A brilliant, realistic, and sad story by a keen observer of our twenty-first century world.
It feels as though lifetimes have passed since a thoughtful and decent man named George Smiley uncovered a mole operating in the deepest and most trusted quarters of England's intelligence services. Somehow, during this time, the ethics and values of intelligence operatives -- and the democracies for which they work -- have eroded.
Continuing along the path Le Carre set 'with his recent works ("A Perfect Spy", "Absolute Friends" and "Our Kind of Traitor"), he documents the intrinsic dishonesty of spying as a profession, and the progressive corruption of Western democratic values we have witnessed over the past two or three decades. In a calm style, and with an exquisite ear for human dialogue, he leads us through a post-Gulf War world in which torture is euphemized by phrases such as "enhanced interrogation" and kidnappings which require violation of another nation's sovereign territory are obfuscated by declaring that the War on Terror requires occasional cases of "extreme rendition".
It is this world, painfully contemporary and real, in which the protagonist of "A Delicate Truth" finds himself. At one level this is a taut, well written spy story which hooks the reader and makes him want to keep reading until the last words are done, at another, it is a deep and considered account of the descent of Western democracy into a darkness which makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish it from its totalitarian and terrorist enemies.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Andre
- 09-07-13
Excellent from the master
This is pure Le Carre. Subtle, tense, dark, exciting, and most of all plausible. Gets you thinking. And as always completely unsentimental.
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2 people found this helpful
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Performance
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Story
- Christine
- 09-22-18
Well-written, very nicely performed
Beautifully written--I love the author's gift for creating sympathetic characters drawn into difficult situations, flawed heroes. I also appreciate his gift for presenting evocative settings without slowing the action.
I was also delighted at the author's skill at reading his own work--the voices and accents were varied enough that it was easy to keep track of a fairly large cast of characters, and all the voices seemed credible, not forced.
I found John Le Carre's pacing as both author and reader impeccable.
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Performance
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- David
- 12-01-22
Master writer, master narrator
I am a long-time Le Carre fan and was not disappointed by this story, although the ending does leave one hanging. I also didn't know what a great narrator he is.
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