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A Perfect Spy

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A Perfect Spy

By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Rory Kinnear
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Brought to you by Penguin.

Magnus Pym - ranking diplomat, consummate Englishman, loving husband, secret agent - has vanished. Has he defected? Gone to ground? As the hunt for Pym intensifies, the secrets of his life are revealed: the people he has loved and betrayed, the unreliable con-man father who made him, the two mentors who moulded and shaped him, and now wish to claim this perfect spy as their own.

Described by le Carré as his most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy is a devastating portrayal of a man who has played different roles for so long, he no longer knows who he is.

'Le Carré understood that espionage is an extreme version of the human comedy, even the human tragedy. A Perfect Spy will very likely remain his greatest book' New Yorker

'The best English novel since the war' Philip Roth

©1986 David Cornwell (P)2025 Penguin Audio

 Espionage Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Tear-jerking War
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Memorable characters, beautifully written and well read - did not want to leave the achingly sad world Pym inhabited.

Heartbreaking insight into the making of poor Magnus

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Rory Kinnear embodied the characters in this book incredibly well. Just genius which made it such a fantastic listen

Le Carre at his most majestic best

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Too long. No indication of period of time in individuals lives being written about. Unnecessary and annoyingly difficult to follow story without this info. Was this an assessment of one’s intelligence ?

Complexity of story initially. But it was surprising simple beneath that facade. A story about relationships really

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Long, depressing and boring early chapters. Perhaps it gets better later… but now I can’t be bothered anymore with the story, or anybody in it. The narrator expresses the vibe very well and enhances the bleak experience of listening to this audiobook.

Long, depressing and boring

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Rory Kinnear is fantastic as the narrator but the book itself must be Le Carre's worst. Overlong and boring, with insufferable, thinly sketched, characters and a meandering narrative that assumes one cares a lot more than one does about the lives of these types of people.

Great Performance, Awful Book

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