Nirmala

In John LeCarré's first novel, we meet the world's most famous undercover operative, George Smiley. The cast of characters includes a bright, twisted former hero of the German underground, a once beautiful woman with a terrifying secret, a high ranking pompous fool of a bureaucrat, and a suspect British civil servant. The protagonist, George Smiley, is bitter and weary - he has seen too much and done too much. Yet he cannot refuse one last desperate call for his services. The author, called by Time magazine, "the premier spy novelist of his time and perhaps all time," employs...

"I am Eva Delectorskaya," Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone. Three decades later the secrets of Sally's past still haunt her.