A Small Town in Germany

About the book

A riveting work of Cold War spy fiction from the master of espionage thrillers, John le Carr's A Small Town in Germany is published with an introduction by Hari Kunzru in Penguin Modern Classics.

West Germany, a simmering cauldron of radical protests, has produced a new danger to Britain: Karfeld, menacing leader of the opposition. At the same time Leo Harting, a Second Secretary in the British Embassy, has gone missing - along with more than forty Confidential embassy files. Alan Turner of the Foreign Office must travel to Bonn to recover them, facing riots, Nazi secrets and the delicate machinations of an unstable Europe in the throes of the Cold War. As Turner gets closer to the truth of Harting's disappearance, he will discover that the face of International relations - and the attentions of the British Ministry itself - is uglier that he could possibly have imagined.

John le Carr (b. 1931) was educated at the University of Berne and at Lincoln College, Oxford. From 1959 to 1964 he was a member of the British Foreign Service, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing novels in 1961, and has since published twenty-one titles, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963),Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Tailor of Panama (1996) and The Constant Gardener (2001).

If you enjoyed A Small Town in Germany, you might like le Carr's The Russia House, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Exciting, compulsively readable and brilliantly plotted'

The New York Times

'Brilliant, unforgettable ... a masterpiece'

New Statesman