Le Carré, who died last December, offers his many fans one final gift: a short novel begun soon after A Delicate Truth (2013) and completed years ago but unpublished till now. Julian Lawndsley, a City trader retired to East Anglia to open a bookshop, is entranced when Edward Avon, a Polish-born customer who was a schoolmate of Julian's father, quietly but persuasively suggests that the two of them work together to open an annex called "the Republic of Literature" that will stock hundreds of classic titles. He'd be even more surprised if he knew that Edward is being investigated by Stewart Proctor, the Head of Domestic Security, who's revisiting the heroic work Edward did during the Bosnian War, when, under the code name Florian, this convert from a communist upbringing zealously toiled for Her Majesty's government until a mysterious debacle abruptly sent him into his own retirement. Proctor's been tipped off by an unlikely source: Edward's wife, Deborah, formerly a top Mideast intelligence analyst, has sent him a long letter from her deathbed. Le Carré plays out revelations about Edward slowly and teasingly, and, in the end, they're as damning as you could wish. The real drama, however, is in the present, where all the characters are hopelessly intertwined and compromised by their loves and loyalties, none of them innocent. The result, as the author's son, Nick Cornwell, says in a brief afterword, "shows a service fragmented"--and not just the Secret Intelligence Service, but the whole domestic society that depends on it. The author's last few novels have been increasingly valedictory, but this one is truly haunted by intimations of mortality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

First-rate prose and a fascinating plot distinguish the final novel from MWA Grand Master le Carré (1931--2020). Two months after leaving a banking job in London, 33-year-old Julian Lawndsley gets a visit from an eccentric customer, Edward Avon, just before closing time at the bookshop Julian now runs in East Anglia. When Julian asks the man what he does, he replies, "Let us say I am a British mongrel, retired, a former academic of no merit and one of life's odd-job men." The next morning, Julian runs into Edward at the local café, where Edward claims he knew Julian's late father at Oxford. Julian later learns that Edward, a Polish emigré, was recruited into the Service years before. Julian senses something is off, as does the head of Domestic Security for the Service, who's investigating Edward's wife, an Arabist and outstanding Service intelligence analyst. While laying out the Avons' intriguing backstories and their current activities, le Carré highlights the evils spies and governments have perpetrated on the world. Many readers will think the book is unfinished--it ends abruptly--but few will find it unsatisfying. This is a fitting coda to a remarkable career. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (Oct.)

Shortly before his death, le Carré asked his son, Nick Cornwell (who writes as Nick Harkaway), to prepare his final novel, still in manuscript, for publication. There wasn't much to do, Cornwell reports in his afterword, except ponder why his father didn't want the book published until after his death. The novel, which centers on Julian Lawndsley, a bookseller in an English seaside town, who becomes ensnared in the clandestine affairs of a Polish émigré, makes a fitting requiem for the career of the man who brought a new level of complexity and humanity to espionage fiction. Drawing on a central theme in his recent work, le Carré again explores the ways in which--as he said in A Delicate Truth (2013)---"institutional will grinds down individual lives." After befriending the émigré, Edward Avon, who may be giving secrets to the wrong people, Lawndsley turns up on the radar of agent Stewart Proctor, who is investigating Avon. The more he digs, however, the more Proctor, like Nat in Agent Running in the Field (2019) and Peter Guillam in A Legacy of Spies (2017), becomes disenchanted, seeing Lawndsley as a naïf caught in the crossfire of backbiting bureaucrats and even Avon as less traitor and more victim. Yes, le Carré has made these points before, but here, in his last ode to disillusioned spies, he makes them with a somber eloquence that reverberates all the more for its finality. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: le Carré's swan song, highly anticipated since its announcement in May, will be celebrated across all media platforms.