Innocents abroad are drawn into the darkest recesses of the financial world in le Carré’s urgent and electrifying new novel.
Britain is in the depths of recession. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump into a Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula and a diamond-encrusted gold watch. He also has a tattoo on his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis.
What else he wants propels the young lovers on a tortuous journey through Paris to a safe house in the Swiss Alps, to the murkiest cloisters of the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain’s Intelligence Establishment.
John le Carré is a master chronicler of contemporary society – Our Kind of Traitor is a story of crime and corruption that goes to the heart of the Russian Mafia and the British establishment.