The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

Recounted with the storytelling lan of a master raconteur by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy. -Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times

The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carr, the legendary author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy;The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; andThe Night Manager, now an Emmy-nominated television series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.John le Carrs new novel, A Legacy of Spies,is now available.

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 Carrhas always written from the heart of modern times.In this, his first memoir,le Carr is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethovens Fifth; visiting Rwandas museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Years Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations ofTinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spyand Smileys People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character inThe Constant Gardener, le Carr endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.

Best of all, le Carr gives us a glimpse of a writers journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.