This is John le Carre's second book in the 'Karla trilogy,' featuring British master-spy George Smiley, the follow-up to his Edgar Award-winning espionage classic, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy . In the wake of a demoralizing infiltration by a Soviet double agent, George Smiley has been made ringmaster of the Circus, aka the British Secret Service. Determined to restore his organization's health and reputation and bent on revenge, Smiley goes on the offensive. Salvaging what he can of the Service's ravaged network of spies, he works them around the clock in search of a whisper of a clue that will lead him back to his opposite number: Karla, the officer who masterminded the infamous treachery. Smiley thrusts his own handpicked operative into action: Jerry Westerby, the 'Honourable Schoolboy,' is dispatched to the Far East. A burial ground of British, French, and American colonial cultures, the region is a fabled testing ground of patriotic allegiances. A new showdown is about to begin. John le Carre's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge and have earned him--and his hero, British Secret Service agent George Smiley--unprecedented worldwide acclaim.