Master spy novelist John le Carre's memoir will hit bookstores in September next year, publisher Penguin Random House has announced.
"The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life" is the first work of non-fiction by Carre, author of novels like "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "The Constant Gardener", "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "A Most Wanted Man" and will open up his extraordinary writing life for the first time.
According to the publisher, the book is an exhilarating journey into the worlds of Carre's 'secret sharers' - the men and women who inspired some of his most enthralling novels - and a testament to the author's unique and personal engagement with the last half-century.
The audiobook, read by the British author who turns 84 later this month, will be released at the same time.
"Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now," Carre says.
For more than 50 years, he has written novels that have been admired by writers such as Philip Roth and Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Robert Harris, and by figures from world politics such as Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi.
He is one of only a handful of writers whose novels have been successfully adapted for the big and small screen and whose characters have been mastered by the greatest actors of their time: in the 1960s by Richard Burton; in the 1970s by Alec Guinness; in 2005 by Ralph Fiennes; in 2014 by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
"It is a huge honour for Penguin Random House to be publishing John le Carre's memoir. 'The Pigeon Tunnel' is the story of our times as seen through the eyes of one of this country's greatest novelists," says Tom Weldon, CEO Penguin Random House UK.
