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friendofgosig 's review for:

Call for the Dead by John le Carré
4.25
dark reflective tense fast-paced

This was a pleasant surprise. I have been skirting around John le  Carré for a while now, really enjoying the few film adaptations of his books that I have seen. I have picked up a few of the Smiley novels in charity shops in the past year, thinking I would give them a go, listening to the first on audiobook because I hadn’t found it yet, and it seemed like an appropriate read for while I was walking the streets of Berlin.

This is quite a short book, and as such the story is quite simple, but I enjoyed the pacing and the depth of the reflection on the pivotal moment in espionage history, Smiley very much giving it a human face. The language was surprisingly beautiful, and I thought the narrator did a really good job of expressing the setting through his accent and tone. I am looking forward to getting into longer more complex book in this series.