Single & Single

Written by John le Carré

Narrated by John le Carré

New York Times bestselling author John le Carré's novels deftly navigate us through the intricate shadow worlds of international intrigue with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him unprecedented worldwide acclaim.

A lawyer from a London finance house is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician in the English countryside is asked to explain the arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust.

In Single & Single, le Carré masterfully establishes a sequence of events whose connections are mysterious, complex and compelling. He tells of corrupt liaisons between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in the West. He also paints an intimate portrait of two families: one Russian, the other English; one trading illicit goods, the other laundering the profits; one betrayed by a son-in-law, the other betrayed, and redeemed, by a son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Mar 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9780743561433

John le Carré

John le Carré was born in 1931. 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 Honorable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People. His novels include The Constant Gardner, The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, Our Game, The Tailor of Panama, and Single & Single. He lives in Cornwall, United Kingdom.

Reviews for Single & Single

[jaygheiser · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great story.

[pferdina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel of international money-laundering and organized crime continues to show how adaptable John le Carre is as a writer. Although well-known for his Cold-War-era spy novels, he does a great job of moving into new territory with this and his other recent works. I admired the main character, Oliver Single, who is in hiding from his father, who he had earlier betrayed to HM Customs as the story begins. However, the unfolding of his history is a little slow to occur and could result in reader confusion; it is not linear and gives this aspect of the story an unnecessarily convoluted progression. Many of the secondary characters are one-dimensional, including Customs officer Brock and love-interest Aggie but it is only Oliver the reader needs to care about. I liked the father-son tension throughout the book and I was not sure Oliver would succeed in locating his father or whether the reunion would be a happy one. But the resolution was too short and abrupt; the book ends just as things are happening, before the reader quite grasps what is going on, and what eventually happens to the major parties is left unsaid. However, the spy-craft is well integrated into and does not steal the show from the human side of the show. The bad guys are sufficiently bad, the good guys sufficiently human, the locales sufficiently exotic to make this a very enjoyable read.

[kromestomes · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although LeCarre can still conjure up the right atmosphere of dread and understated violence, his plotting here is pretty weak.Oliver Single, son of international "entrepreneur" Tiger Single, is just shocked to find out that his father has built his finance firm by facilitating some pretty shady practices. So Single the younger goes to the authorities, etc., who put him through the witness relocation/new life kind of thing.A few years later a major deal goes bad for dad, who ends up disappearing ... has he just gone to ground? Do the evil Georgians have him? Single Jr., wallowing in Oedipal nuttiness, hooks up with some of England's finest to save the day!But really, ol' Tiger is just another international high-finance criminal w/o a "single" redeeming quality, so why should we care about him again?Ollie, on the other hand, must have something going on ... he's able to get two highly unlikely women to fall in love with him based pretty much on ... nothing. And let's not even mention Oliver's elder/perfect brother, dad's favorite, who conveniently died of leukemia before being able to grow up and take the reins at Single.Sigh. Somewhere, George Smiley is rolling in his grave.

[phillund · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I could not get excited by this book. Almost boring.

[hugh_ashton_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In some ways the best, in some ways one of the worst of le Carr?'s books. The best, in that it deals with a genuine sense of outrage against the corruption that runs like a rotten seam through the British Establishment. The setting (finance) is something I know a little about, and it rings pretty true. One of the worst of his books, because we've seen it all before: deception on several levels, the self-doubt and angst that come with deception, and the love of a good woman. But it doesn't stop Oliver from being one of my favorite le Carr? heroes, or the theme from being any less true than it ever has been.

[johnthefireman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one is good. The complicated twists and turns of the plot are classic le Carre.

[booksfordinner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another great Le Carre. One of the first after the wall came down, and who the bad guys are isn't as easy to decide! I'm sure that Oliver's relationship with Tiger has some beginnings in Le Carre's own crazy relationship with his.

[smik_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Publisher's Summary:A corporate lawyer from the House of Single &Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside for crimes that he does not understand. A children?s entertainer in Devon is hauled to his local bank late at night to explain a monumental influx of cash. A Russian freighter is arrested in the Black Sea....The logical connection of these events and more is one of the many pleasures of this story of love, deceit, family and the triumph of humanity.Single & Single are a firm of financial enablers. Among their clients are the Russian capitalists, the Orlov family, out to make quick roubles. Their biggest scheme so far is the sale of "clean caucasoid" blood to the West. Money managers, the House of Single, Tiger Single, the senior partner, with his son Oliver, are set to reap a fortune. However events impair the smooth flow of cash, and the Russian partners turn to a new means of profit-making, drugs. As a lawyer in a financial management organisation, Oliver draws the line at drugs. It jeopardizes the future of the firm, and his own. He informs on his father to British government officials in the hope of cutting a deal. It takes four years for the government to act, and then their actions result in Tiger's disappearance. But it seems that Oliver was not the only one to betray Tiger.This was not an easy story to listen to, although narrated extremely well by Michael Jayston. The event with which the story opens, the death of Albert Wincer, really comes midway in the plot, and from that point on Le Carre feeds the reader tidbits, almost in the style of jigsaw puzzle pieces plucked randomly from the box. Sometimes the bits fit, and at other times we have to mentally set them aside for later use. If this was a held-in-the-hand paper book the reader would have the advantage of flipping backwards and forwards, re-reading bits, but you can't do that with an audio.One of the things that other reviewers have commented on is the fact that at the end it felt as if Le Carre could not get shut of the reader quickly enough. However I had made up my mind about my rating well before that. Perhaps I would have liked it better if I was "reading" it in another format. I may not have had the continuity problems that I referred to earlier. The story did have redeeming features: interesting characters, and good exploration of the relationships between them.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What links a corporate lawyer facing death on a Turkish hillside with a children's entertainer from Devon? An interesting thriller spanning Europe from England to Georgia.