{"product_id":"the-secret-life-of-john-le-carre-isbn-9780063341043","title":"The Secret Life of John le Carre","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSecrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Secret Life of John le Carré\u003c\/em\u003e reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. “Now that he is dead,” Sisman writes, “we can know him better.”\u003c\/p\u003e | \u003cp\u003e“What could have been a cloying hagiography or a lurid warts-and-all exposé is instead a balanced, focused and compelling study of a man of depth and individuality… This biography expertly shows how distance, distrust and even disillusionment have informed Mr le Carré and influenced his bestselling fiction.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Economist on John Le Carre\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“In John le Carré: The Biography, Mr. Sisman creates an insightful and highly readable portrait of a writer and a man who has often been as elusive and enigmatic as his fictional heroes.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMichiko Kakutani, New York Times on John Le Carre\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Loose threads are what fascinate most about Adam Sisman’s biography of David Cornwell, who at 84 still writes and publishes knotty, brainy thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré…Best of all, Sisman provides aficionados of le Carré‘s fiction with canny assessments of, and inside information on all his written work.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eUSA Today on John Le Carre\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Page-turning . . . . Adam Sisman completes the task of showing us who [John le Carré] was—a minor spy who became a major novelist, whose most important agents in the field were the women he needed to love and then betray. For le Carré, tradecraft was lovecraft. Much more than What Was Left Out, \u003cem\u003eThe Secret Life of John le Carré \u003c\/em\u003eis not merely the conclusive homage to a compulsively fascinating character, but an insightful study into the biographical process itself. Even David Cornwell, the man who actually was John le Carré, would have saluted him.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNicholas Shakespeare\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A more rounded and less appealing picture of Cornwell—complex, vain, emotionally manipulative—emerges from this . . . book than before. But it does not diminish the literary and moral seriousness of le Carré’s greatest novels about the secret world.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A one-of-a-kind revisiting of a wondrously productive life lived at the expense of two wives and many lovers.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Revealing . . . . Future accounts of le Carré’s life will have to wrestle with the bombshells dropped here.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“While there is plenty of tabloid-worthy material between its covers, the book is nonetheless complex and consequential . . . [it] is also a fascinating examination of the biographer’s art that casts le Carre’s life and writing in a fresh light.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A deeply entertaining book . . . . A determined and at times forensic attempt to set the record straight, detailing the full extent of what was kept from him, going to town on le Carré’s obstructiveness and reality-softening, undermining various aspects of the le Carré legend and exposing the decades-long exercise in stage management that lay at its unexpectedly chilly heart.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Spectator\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harper","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44890530840805,"sku":"NP9780063341043","price":27.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780063341043.jpg?v=1730233504","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-secret-life-of-john-le-carre-isbn-9780063341043","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}