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John le Carré‘s famous spy character George Smiley hasn’t retired quite yet. Nick Harkaway, le Carré’s son, is writing a new Smiley novel that will publish globally in fall 2024.
Smiley was known for his depiction as the archetypal British secret agent of the 20th century through novels such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. From his debut in 1961 to his most recent outing in 2017, Smiley novels have sold more than 30 million copies across formats.
The book will explore the decade of Smiley’s life in between the final scenes of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the start of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The polite and self-deprecating character works for the shadowy British intelligence agency ‘The Circus’ and is considered a foil to the showier James Bond.
Penguin Random House’s label Viking will publish the new, currently unnamed book in the UK, U.S. and Canada after acquiring global English-language rights from Curtis Brown boss Jonny Geller. International language deals are being negotiated.
Le Carré (real name David Cornwell) died in December 2020 aged 89. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, published in 2016 to acclaim and was adapted into a doc by Errol Morris. It screened at Telluride, Toronto, New York and London before selling to Apple TV+, which launched it in October. His final book, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.
Harkaway (born Nick Cornwell) is the author of books such as Gnomon, The Gone-Away World, Tigerman and Titanium Noir and writes the Jack Price novels under the pen name Aidan Truhen. His brothers, Simon and Stephen Cornwell, run The Ink Factory, which has adapted le Carré novels The Night Manager and The Little Drummer Girl into TV series and A Most Wanted Man as a feature.
‘Smiley is woven into my life,” said Harkaway. “Tinker Tailor was written in the two years after I was born and I grew up with the evolution of the Circus, so this is a deeply personal journey for me, and of course it’s a journey which has to feel right to the le Carré audience. It also seems as if we need the Smiley stories back now because they ask us the questions of the moment: what compassion do we owe to one another as human beings, and at what point does that compassion become more important than nation, law or duty?”
“When I read the opening chapters of Nick’s story, I had this uncanny feeling David (John le Carré) had just delivered his new work to me,” said Curtis Brown CEO Geller. “I heard David’s voice lift off the page. Not only has Nick caught his father’s idiom, but he has also inhabited the world of the Circus and Tinker Tailor to create a completely new story, set in the period just after the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This will be the literary event of 2024.”
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