Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Its place in Smiley versus Karla

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is book 1 in the Smiley versus Karla series. It is followed by The Honourable Schoolboy. See the full Smiley versus Karla reading order.

The Karla Trilogy is John le Carré's masterwork: three novels tracing a decade-long, deeply personal chess match between George Smiley -- the rumpled, brilliant, endlessly patient former head of British intelligence -- and Karla, his unseen Soviet counterpart and opposite number. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens with Smiley pulled out of forced retirement to hunt a Soviet mole buried at the top of the Circus (le Carré's fictional MI6), in a novel built almost entirely from interviews, memory, and deduction rather…