A Delicate Truth

John le CarrÄ has always been an author who provides a brilliant listening experience when he reads his own work. We hear him here at 81, subjecting himself to the rigors of an unabridged reading of his newest novel. He's very much up to the task, and delivers the many nuances of A DELICATE TRUTH, which explores the moral challenges and questionable compromises of "the global war on terror." Like all of le CarrÄ's work--supposedly fictional--it reads with prickling reality. This "truth" takes on the international intelligence world of defense contractors, arms dealers, government cover-ups, and the treachery of espionage. Two time lines and a hefty weight of bread-crumb clues demand careful listening. Despite le CarrÄ's aged voice, the subtlety of his accents and his signature attention to details through pacing make this excellent listening. The author's passion and anger about the subject are unleashed in the text, yet finely controlled in his performance. R.F.W. Winner of AudioFIle Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

March 18, 2013
State-sanctioned duplicity drives bestseller le Carré’s entertainingly labyrinthine if overly polemical 23rd novel, which features a corrupt British Foreign Office minister, Fergus Quinn, and an American private defense contractor “best known as Ethical Outcomes.” In 2008, a cloak-and-dagger plot to capture an arms dealer in Gibraltar under the mantle of counterterrorism goes awry. Quinn’s secretary, Toby Bell, who was kept out of the loop, has incriminating information about the mission and the chance to use it three years later when one of the soldiers involved ends up dead and a retired British diplomat, roped into participating against his will, tries to salve his conscience about some nasty pieces of collateral damage. As usual, le Carré (Our Kind of Traitor) tells a great story in sterling prose, but he veers dangerously close to farce and caricature, particularly with the comically amoral Americans. His best work has been about the moral ambiguity of spying, while this novel feels as if the issue of who’s bad and who’s good is too neatly sewn up. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown.