An immensely clever piece of novelistic engineering
Guardian
A splendid novel
Sunday Times
[A] late-career triumph
1843 Magazine
It's brilliantly done and very enjoyable
Prospect
This really is vintage le Carre
Mail on Sunday
This sublime thriller
Sunday Mirror
Thrilling and fascinating - a satisfying close to the saga
The Independent
[Le Carre's] writing has lost none of its pith or potency . . . his powers of invention have kept up with the pace of an ever-changing and complex world'
The Scotsman
This is a truly wonderful, morally complex, politically astute novel written with elegance and panache . . . the visceral thrill of its twists and its complexities, its edge-of-the-seat qualities
Scotland on Sunday
Razor-sharp insight from the battle-weary Guillam and fascinating glimpses into the murky spycraft at the height of the Cold War only add to the joy of this sublimely accomplished thriller
The People
[As] labyrinthine as you'd expect ... le Carre has always been a master
The Tablet
Deeply moving in its portrait of a man adrift in a climate he no longer understands
Metro
le Carre has made and peopled a myth. Myths do not age
Financial Times
George Smiley is our favourite fictional spy
Sunday Express
A literary master for a generation
Observer
The best spy story I have ever read
Graham Greene on The Spy Who Came In From The Cold He's one of those writers who will be read a century from now
Robert Harris He can communicate emotion, from sweating fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all, he can tell a tale. Formidable equipment for a rare and disturbing writer
Sunday Times
I have re-read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold over and over again since I first encountered it in my teens, just to remind myself how extraordinary a work of fiction can be
Malcolm Gladwell The literary event of the Autumn
Evening Standard
We are back in the more interesting territory of moral uncertainty and failure. What, Smiley asks, was he fighting for?
TLS
Utterly engrossing and perfectly pitched, it is a triumph
Daily Mail
Ingenious
Washington Post
What are we to make of Smiley? What is his game? Do we like him? Admire him? Every le Carre reader has wrestled with these questions-and A Legacy of Spies brings them to the fore more directly than any previous book
Vanity Fair
The old magic still holds . . . I might as well say it: to read this simmering novel is to come in from the cold
New York Times
Le Carre has always known how to make his readers hang on barbed-wire tenterhooks. He drip-feeds information with such suspense-building miserliness that our befogged state matches that of the field agents - the joes - who glimpse one piece of the secret jigsaw at a time
Financial Times
Le Carre is on absolutely cracking form. No writer has ever been better at turning the act of two people talking politely to each other across a desk into a blood sport
The Daily Telegraph
Part of the pleasure of this novel is that the characters seem so much cleverer than we are ... haunting, fascinating ... it also made me want to reread the entire Smiley sequence
Spectator
A compelling tale of Cold War duplicity and manoeuvrings in the British secret service ... as ever much of the pleasure of reading le Carre is that you have to be on your intellectual mettle
William Boyd
New Statesman
A tense, intricately plotted espionage thriller . . . sheer genius from le Carre
Saga Magazine
His writing is as crisp as ever ... another tale of intrigue which will slip effortlessly into its place in the Smiley canon
Daily Express
A Legacy of Spies deploys a complex and ingeniously layered structure to make the past alive in the present once more ... le Carre has not lost his touch
Evening Standard
The English canon has rarely seen an acclaimed novelist and popular entertainer sustain such a hot streak in old age....A Legacy of Spies achieves many things. Outstandingly, it is a defiant assertion of creative vigour...Cornwell is signing off with a poignant and brilliant au revoir to le Carre, his alter ego, a writer who is with the immortals
The Observer
le Carre's masterful new novel
Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
This novel offers more than one pleasure. It is not merely good in itself - vintage John le Carre. It gives the reader, at long last, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been missing for 54 years.... A Legacy of Spies does something remarkable. Le Carre takes a le Carre classic and thickens it into something different from what it was....Like wine, le Carre's writing has got richer with age...Don't wait for the paperback
The Times
Perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain. He will have charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has. He's in the first rank
Ian McEwan A brilliant novel of deception, love and trust to join his supreme espionage canon
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Evening Standard, Books of the Year
Gripping, fast-paced . . . A splendid novel
Andrew Marr
Sunday Times
Not since The Spy Who Came in From The Cold has le Carre exercised his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such thrilling effect
John Banville
Guardian