The Tailor of Panama - Softcover

Le Carré, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345420438 ISBN 13: 9780345420435

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1997

Synopsis

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies and The Night Manager, now an AMC miniseries

He is Harry Pendel: Exclusive tailor to Panama’s most powerful men. Informant to British Intelligence. The perfect spy in a country rife with corruption and revolution. What his “handlers” don’t realize is that Harry has a hidden agenda of his own. Deceiving his friends, his wife, and practically himself, he’ll weave a plot so fabulous it exceeds his own vivid imagination. But when events start to spin out of control, Harry is suddenly in over his head—thrown into a lethal maze of politics and espionage, with unthinkable consequences. . . . 

Praise for The Tailor of Panama

“Entertaining . . . a riotous, readable novel . . . A worthy successor to Graham Greene’s most wicked entertainments.”—The New York Times

“Riveting . . . Le Carré has cut another masterpiece.”—Los Angeles Times

“What makes le Carré the reigning grand master of espionage fiction? . . . Craft, certainly; he maintains an almost magnificent control of material, pace, dialogue, characterization.”—The Baltimore Sun

“Brilliant . . . Le Carré remains fair in front of his field, a startlingly up-to-date storyteller who writes as well about the shadows around the power elite as anyone alive.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About this title

Review

John le Carré, the greatest spy novelist of the Cold War era, continues his post-Cold War quest to define the genre he helped perfect. The classic spy novel was essentially a story of good (England, the United States) vs. evil (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union), in which good more or less prevailed. The Tailor of Panama is something else entirely: a spy novel with no spies in which the bad guys reap most of the rewards. It is also a viciously funny satire. The novel is set in Panama, where a plot is in place to make void the Panama Treaty, which would return control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians in 1999. At the center of events is Harry Pendel, the tailor of the title. Coerced into working for British Intelligence, he concocts out of whole cloth a left-wing movement with the goal of luring the American military to do the dirty work--invade Panama à la 1989 and nullify the treaty. From the characters to the setting, le Carré has succeeded in setting new parameters for an old genre.

From the Publisher

10 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0345420438
• ISBN 13: 9780345420435
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 416