The Naïve and Sentimental Lover - by John Le Carré (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: Great Britain: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971.

Book Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now a television series starring Tom Hiddleston.

"I have visited bohemia and got away unscathed."

Aldo Cassidy is an entrepreneurial genius. At thirty-nine, he dominates the baby pram market and rewards his success with a custom Bentley. But Aldo's bourgeois life is upended by a chance encounter with Shamus--a charismatic writer whose first and only novel blazoned across the firmament twenty years earlier. The two develop a passionate friendship that draws Aldo--smitten also with his new friend's luscious wife--into a life of reckless hedonism that threatens to consume them all.

John le Carré's The Naïve and Sentimental Lover offers a dark and ribald send-up of both middle-class bohemian pretensions that will astonish and delight his many fans.

With a foreword by the author.

Review Quotes

"Splendid, original...le Carré shows how endowed he is with the gift of storytelling."--The Times (UK)

"Comic and touching...this novel is brilliant and marvelously good reading."--Book World

About the Author

John le Carré was born in 1931. For six decades, he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a con man, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence (MI5&6). He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. He died on December 12, 2020.