BOOK SUMMARY
A lawyer from the London finance house of Single
& Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was
in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked by his bank to
explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young
daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast
guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single
disappears into thin air.
In Single & Single the writer who both epitomizes and transcends the novel
of espionage opens with a haunting set piece, then establishes a sequence of events whose
connections are mysterious, complex and compelling. This is a story of corrupt liaisons
between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in
the West. Le Carré's finest novel in years, it is also an intimate portrait of two
families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering
the profits; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed, and redeemed, by a son.
This is territory le Carré knows better than anyone. Masterful and prescient, he is
writing at the height of his creative powers, and Oliver Single, the central protagonist,
is one of his most fascinating characters.
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Chicago Tribune
Tom Wolfe
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