Personal letters of the late British author John le Carré to be published this fall

A book coming out this fall will show readers a more personal side of the late British novelist John le Carré. Book publisher Viking, an imprint of Penguin Canada, announced Wednesday that A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré will be published Nov. 8, 2022.

Edited by the author's son, Tim Cornwell, the book includes correspondence with Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Laurie and Alec Guinness, the actor famed for playing le Carré's fictional spy, George Smiley, in adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and other classic thrillers.

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"John le Carré has had a legendary career and we're proud that Penguin Canada has been his publisher for the entirety of his career. We're thrilled to join our proud publishing partners in sharing this intimate portrait of a masterful storyteller," said Nicole Winstanley, publisher of Penguin Canada, in a statement.

"There are letters about his first marriage and letters to his children. There are wonderfully vivid letters to great actors and great writers. There are brilliantly sharp and very funny portraits of politicians and public figures."

Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, died on Dec. 12, 2020. Before becoming an author, he worked as a spy for Britain's intelligence service during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and early 1960s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he also wrote about conflicts and corruption in countries around the world, from Panama to Kenya.

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Le Carré probed the morally murky world of espionage and rose to prominence with his breakthrough 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The last novel published in his lifetime, Agent Running in the Field, was an international bestseller in 2019.

LISTEN | John le Carré on Writers & Company

Writers and Company1:00:53The legacy of John le Carré: master of the political thriller

The British spy-turned-novelist died on Dec. 12, 2020, at 89. In this 2010 interview, le Carré spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about how his childhood and career in Britain's intelligence service shaped his fiction.

"And by and large, I would always now do my best to put humanity first and duty second. The other thing that has driven me a great deal is the recognition that the dissemination of information, on a vast scale, is not the same as the dissemination of the truth," Le Carré told Writers & Company's Eleanor Wachtel in 2010.

His last full-length novel, Silverview, was published in October of 2021. 

With files by CBC Books