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Zusatztext “One of our great writers of moral ambiguity! a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-man’s land… Our Kind of Traitor brims with deftly drawn characters navigating a treacherously uncertain landscape that seems ripped from yesterday’s papers and re-created with an absolutely certain hand.”—Tim Rutten! Los Angeles Times “Part vintage John le Carré and part Alfred Hitchcock…the suspense in Our Kind of Traitor is genuine and nerve-racking.”—Michiko Kakutani! The New York Times “I would suggest immortality for John le Carré! who I believe one of the most intelligent and entertaining writers working today.”— The Chicago Tribune. Informationen zum Autor New York Times bestselling author John le Carré ( A Delicate Truth and Spy Who Came in from the Cold ) was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For the last fifty years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall. 1 At seven o'clock of a Caribbean morning, on the island of Antigua, one Peregrine Makepiece, otherwise known as Perry, an all-round amateur athlete of distinction and until recently tutor in English literature at a distinguished Oxford college, played three sets of tennis against a muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle fifties called Dima. How this match came about was quickly the subject of intense examination by British agents professionally disposed against the workings of chance. Yet the events leading up to it were on Perry's side blameless. The dawning of his thirtieth birthday three months previously had triggered a life-change in him that had been building up for a year or more without his being aware of it. Seated head in hands at eight o'clock in the morning in his modest Oxford rooms, after a seven-mile run that had done nothing to ease his sense of calamity, he had searched his soul to know just what the first third of his natural life had achieved, apart from providing him with an excuse for not engaging in the world beyond the city's dreaming spires. * Why? To any outward eye, his was the ultimate academic success story. The State-educated son of secondary-school teachers arrives in Oxford from London University laden with academic honours and takes up a three-year post awarded him by an ancient, rich, achievement-driven college. His first name, traditionally the property of the English upper classes, derives from a rabble-rousing Methodist prelate of the nineteenth century named Arthur Peregrine of Huddersfield. In the term time, when he isn't teaching, he distinguishes himself as a cross-country runner and sportsman. On his spare evenings he helps out in a local youth club. In vacations he conquers difficult peaks and Most Serious climbs. Yet when his college offers him a permanent Fellowship?or to his present soured way of thinking, imprisonment for life?he baulks. Again: why? Last term he had delivered a series of lectures on George Orwell under the title 'A Stifled Britain?' and his rhetoric had alarmed him. Would Orwell have believed it possible that the same overfed voices which had haunted him in the 1930s, the same crippling incompetence, addiction to foreign wars and assumptions of entitlement, were happily in place in 2009? Receiving no response from the blank student faces staring up at him, he had supplied it for himself: no , Orwell would emphatically not have believed it. Or if he had, he would have taken to the streets. He would have smashed some serious glass. * It was a topic he had thrashed out mercilessly with Gail, his longstanding girlfriend, as they lay in her bed after a birthday supper at the flat in Primrose Hill that she had part-inherited from ...
