John le Carré Books in Order (The Little Drummer Girl, George Smiley,…)

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David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author of espionage novels. He died in 2020 and left us with more than 20 books.

After working for the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) during the ’50s and ’60s, John le Carré stopped doing spy work to work as a writer of spy stories. His most famous creation is George Smiley, a recurring character that can be described as the anti-James Bond, which tells you a lot about the kind of story le Carré has written during his long career.

How to read John le Carré’s Books in Order?

Reading The George Smiley Series in Order

George Smiley is a career intelligence officer with ‘The Circus’–the British overseas intelligence agency and is certainly the most famous British spy after James Bond. For more information on the books and the character, go to our article dedicated to George Smiley.

1. Call for the Dead (1961)
2. A Murder of Quality (1962)
3. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
4. The Looking Glass War (1965)
5. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)
6. The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
7. Smiley’s People (1979)
8. The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
9. A Legacy of Spies (2017)

Reading the Standalone Novels by John le Carré

• A Small Town in Germany (1968) – The British Embassy in Bonn is up in arms. Her Majesty’s financially troubled government is seeking admission to Europe’s Common Market just as anti-British factions are rising to power in Germany. Rioters are demanding reunification, and the last thing the Crown can afford is a scandal. Then Leo Harting-an embassy nobody-goes missing with a case full of confidential files. London sends Alan Turner to control the damage, but he soon realizes that neither side really wants Leo found-alive.
• The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971) – Aldo Cassidy is an entrepreneurial genius. At thirty-nine, he dominates the baby pram market and rewards his success with a custom Bentley. But Aldo’s bourgeois life is upended by a chance encounter with Shamus-a charismatic writer whose first and only novel blazoned across the firmament twenty years earlier. The two develop a passionate friendship that draws Aldo-smitten also with his new friend’s luscious wife-into a life of reckless hedonism that threatens to consume them all.
• The Little Drummer Girl (1983) – On holiday in Mykonos, Charlie wants only sunny days and a brief escape from England’s bourgeois dreariness. Then a handsome stranger lures the aspiring actress away from her pals-but his intentions are far from romantic. Joseph is an Israeli intelligence officer, and Charlie has been wooed to flush out the leader of a Palestinian terrorist group responsible for a string of deadly bombings. Still uncertain of her own allegiances, she debuts in the role of a lifetime as a double agent in the “theatre of the real.”

• A Perfect Spy (1986) – Over the course of his seemingly irreproachable life, Magnus Pym has been all things to all people: a devoted family man, a trusted colleague, a loyal friend-and the perfect spy. But in the wake of his estranged father’s death, Magnus vanishes, and the British Secret Service is up in arms. Is it grief, or is the reason for his disappearance more sinister? And who is the mysterious man with the sad moustache who also seems to be looking for Magnus?
• The Russia House (1989) – “Glasnost” is on everyone’s lips, but the rules of the game haven’t changed for either side. When a beautiful Russian woman foists off a manuscript on an unwitting bystander at the Moscow Book Fair, it’s a miracle that she flies under the Soviets’ radar. Or does she? The woman’s source (codename: Bluebird) will trust only Barley Blair, a whiskey-soaked gentleman publisher with a poet’s heart. Coerced by British and American Intelligence, Blair journeys to Moscow to determine whether Bluebird’s manuscript contains the truth-or the darkest of fictions.
• The Night Manager (1993) – With the Cold War over, a new era of espionage has begun. In the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union, arms dealers and drug smugglers have risen to immense influence and wealth. The sinister master of them all is Richard Onslow Roper, the charming, ruthless Englishman whose operation seems untouchable. Slipping into this maze of peril is Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier who’s currently the night manager of a posh hotel in Zurich. Having learned to hate and fear Roper more than any man on earth, Pine is willing to do whatever it takes to help the agents at Whitehall bring him down-and personal vengeance is only part of the reason why.

• Our Game (1995) – 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. But when both Emma and Cranmer’s star double agent and lifelong rival, Larry Pettifer, disappear, Cranmer is suddenly on the run, searching for his brilliant protégé, desperately eluding his former colleagues, in a frantic journey across Europe and into the lawless, battered landscapes of Moscow and southern Russia, to save whatever of his life he has left. . . .
• The Tailor of Panama (1996) – He is Harry Pendel: Exclusive tailor to Panama’s most powerful men. Informant to British Intelligence. The perfect spy in a country rife with corruption and revolution. What his “handlers” don’t realize is that Harry has a hidden agenda of his own. Deceiving his friends, his wife, and practically himself, he’ll weave a plot so fabulous it exceeds his own vivid imagination. But when events start to spin out of control, Harry is suddenly in over his head-thrown into a lethal maze of politics and espionage, with unthinkable consequences. . .
• Single & Single (1999) – Why was an English lawyer shot dead in Turkey by his firm’s top client? How can a down-at-heel magician in Devon explain the vast fortune that has mysteriously appeared in his daughter’s trust fund? With customs officer Nat Brock on the trail, the answers point to the House of Single – once a respectable finance company, now entangled with a Russian crime syndicate.

• The Constant Gardener (2001) – Everything began with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya’s Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa’s much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.
• Absolute Friends (2003) – Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the crippled Sasha. After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only, answer to life-this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they?
• The Mission Song (2006) – As an interpreter of African languages, Bruno Salvador is much in demand. He makes it a principle to remain neutral – no matter what he hears. But when he is summoned on a secret job for British Intelligence, he is told he will have to get his hands dirty. His mission is to help bring democracy to the Congo – democracy that will be delivered at the end of a gun barrel.

• A Most Wanted Man (2008) – A half-starved young Russian man is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa…. Annabel, an idealistic young German civil-rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. In pursuit of his mysterious past, she confronts the incongruous Tommy Brue, the 60-year-old scion of Brue Frères, a failing British bank based in Hamburg. Annabel, Issa, and Brue form an unlikely alliance and a triangle of impossible loves is born.
• Our Kind of Traitor (2010) – In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with Britain on the brink of economic ruin, a young English couple takes a vacation in Antigua. There they meet Dima, a Russian who styles himself the world’s Number One money-launderer and who wants, among other things, a game of tennis. Back in London, the couple is subjected to an interrogation by the British Secret service who also need their help. Their acquiescence will lead them on a precarious journey through Paris to a safe house in Switzerland, helpless pawns in a game of nations that reveals the unholy alliances between the Russian mafia, the City of London, the government and the competing factions of the British Secret Service.
• A Delicate Truth (2013) – A counter-terrorist operation, codenamed 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?

• Agent Running in the Field (2019) – Nat, a 47-year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. The only bright light on the team is young Florence, who has her eye on Russia Department and a Ukrainian oligarch with a finger in the Russia pie.
• Silverview (2021) – 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. When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea . . .

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Non-Fiction book by John le Carré

• A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (2022) – The never-before-seen correspondence of John le Carré, one of the most important novelists of our generation, are collected in this beautiful volume. During his lifetime, le Carré wrote numerous letters to writers, spies, politicians, artists, actors and public figures. This collection is a treasure trove, revealing the late author’s humor, generosity, and wit–a side of him many readers have not previously seen.

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If you like our John le Carré reading order, you may also want to take a look at our guide to the Slough House series, or Alan Furst’s books. Don’t hesitate to follow us on Twitter or Facebook to discover more book series.