Our Game

At forty-eight, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in premature retirement to deepest rural England. His Cold War is fought and won, and he is free to devote himself to his stately manor house, his vineyard, and his beautiful young mistress, Emma.

But no man can escape his past, and Tim's lives twenty miles away, in the chaotic person of Larry Pettifer: bored radical don, philanderer, and for twenty years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanquished Communist threat. Between the two stands an unresolved rivalry.

As the story opens, Larry and Emma have disappeared. Setting off in pursuit of them, Tim discovers that he too is being pursued, by his former masters. The hunter becomes the hunted. Raiding his own past like a thief, he follows Larry and Emma into the minefield -- physical and emotional -- of their new allegiance.

Our Game is John le Carre at his incomparable best.


From the Trade Paperback edition.