London's Slough House is where disgraced MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their washed-up careers. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle--not unusual in this line of work. But they have one thing in common: they all want to be back in the action. And they'll do anything to...

It would have been an easy job for the Circus: A can of film couriered from Helsinki to London. In the past the Circus handled all things political, while the Department dealt with matters military. But the Department has been moribund since the War, its resources siphoned away. Now, one of their agents is dead, and vital evidence verifying the presence of Soviet missiles near the West German border is gone. John Avery is the Department's younger...

Buried deep within the consciousness of Sergeant Raymond Shaw is the mechanism of an assassin-a time bomb ticking toward explosion, controlled by the delicate skill of its Communist masters.

In an isolated village in the mountains of Andalusia, a mysterious Frenchwoman begins work on a dangerous memoir. It is the story of a man she once loved in the Beirut of old, and a child taken from her in treason's name. The woman is the keeper of the Kremlin's most closely guarded secret. Long ago, the KGB inserted a mole into the heart of the West -- a mole who stands on the doorstep of ultimate power. Only one man can unravel the conspiracy: Gabriel...

Catesby, a disgraced British spy, faces danger at every turn when he is pressured by Henry Bone, a Whitehall intelligence mandarin, into going undercover as a defector in 1956 in order to expose Butterfly, an agent who knows secrets that can destroy lives and reputations, and who is rumored to be headed to America.

"We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions...

A young British post office technician becomes deeply involved in electronic surveillance in postwar Berlin in 1955.

"Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier has just arrived from war-torn Europe to find his brother has died in mysterious circumstances. Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a successful movie career, and a heroic past choose to kill himself? Ben enters the uneasy world beneath the glossy shine of the movie business, where politics and the dream factories collide and Communist witch hunts are rendering the biggest star makers vulnerable. Even here, where...

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George...

In January 1958, the midst of the Cold War, Luke Lucas wakes alone on the ground in a railway station with no idea how he got there--and finds that he must recover lost memories that others are glad he has forgotten if he is to save the launch of Explorer I, America's attempt to top the Soviet Union's Sputnik.