Adam Sisman on John le Carré

John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) has topped bestseller lists for over half a century; since the sensational Spy who came in from the cold hit bookshelves le Carré has been Britain’s uncontested master of the espionage novel.

Celebrated biographer and historian Adam Sisman invites us to look behind the curtain with a brilliant new biography, drawing on exclusive access to David Cornwell himself. Featuring a wealth of previously unseen material and insights from the most important people in his life – family, friends, enemies, intelligence ex-colleagues and ex-lovers – Sisman’s revealing biography brings in from the cold a man whose own life has been as complex, as confounding and as filled with treachery as any of his novels. There are a few writers of spy fiction, if any, who have more personal experience in the world of espionage than John le Carré. ‘I’m a liar,’ Cornwell has written. ‘Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.’

The guile and nuance Sisman has employed to produce this enthralling biography has garnered the book rave reviews from the Evening Standard to the New York Times, from the Guardian to the Independent, which called it “the best biography of 2015 – a rare achievement that invites rereading.”