Will I love Karla's Choice?

Writing a new John le Carré novel when you are not John le Carré would be a daunting task for any author. Maybe even more so when he happened to be your dad. But Nick Harkaway has risen impressively to the challenge. Karla’s Choice is a return to the murky labyrinthine world of international Cold War chicanery and espionage. Murder, betrayal, deceit, clandestine ops and geopolitics - George Smiley and the Circus are back. It’s as if John le Carré never left us.

Writing in the style of a beloved author is always risky – infinitely more so when that author was your father. Nick Cornwell’s seamless editing of John le Carré’s posthumously published final novel, Silverview, boded well for his full-length foray (under his own pen-name, Nick Harkaway) into the morally murky world of George Smiley. The result, however, goes far beyond literary mimicry.

Taking place between the events of 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this book reads like nothing less than a lost le Carré. The ironic tone, the intricate texture,… show more.

One of my biggest influences, John le Carré, has supplied a whole generation of readers with (mostly) Cold War-era thrillers that proved sharp, incisive, minutely constructed, and often fun (in a quintessentially British manner). 

A legend of the craft, le Carré fathered a child, Nick Harkaway, who happens to share the same predisposition for precise and compelling espionage stories with memorable dialogue. For those of you familiar with le Carré’s work, you’ve heard of George Smiley, one of his most recognizable characters—an anti-James Bond with a self-effacing persona and an unassuming stature who is, in fact, lethal and highly effective.… show more.

The characters were created by the author's father, John le Carre. What I really liked was that Harkaway recreated them so successfully. Similarly, he was able to recreate the decades' old spy world.