Details
Synopsis
Ted Mundy has lived a very complicated life. Now working as a tour guide in Germany (and spending most of his time dodging creditors), Ted was once a spy for the British government. Life is difficult but predictable for the disillusioned Ted until he encounters his old friend and fellow former spy, Sasha. Sasha has big, seemingly idealistic plans--plans that involve Ted and a wealthy philanthropist named Dimitri. Getting involved in Sasha's scheme could make Ted a very wealthy man. But who is Dimitri. And why is all his money tied to Middle Eastern bank accounts?
| Size | | Height: | 6.8 in | | Width: | 4.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 5.6 oz |
Industry Reviews
"...[Le Carre's ] passion and his conviction will grab your heart and mind....Invigorating."
Literary Review - Philip Oakes (02/01/2004)
"Unlike the great majority of best-selling writers of popular fiction, John le Carré never, ever phones it in--not even on a secure line. He's an old pro with the ardent heart of an amateur, which is why, at the age of 72 and with four decades of critical and commercial success under his belt, he is still capable of producing a novel as odd, as ungainly, and as compelling as ABSOLUTE FRIENDS."
New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty (01/18/2004)
"ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is intentionally provocative, and it will win the desired outrage from those who support the Bush policies, just as it will please those who oppose them. It is a polemic, in a tradition that goes back to Shakespeare's portrait of Richard III, Swift's modest proposal and Orwell's 1984. History can decide whether Le Carré is right or wrong, prophet or crank, but no one can deny that for the world's leading spy novelist, a man with roots deep in British intelligence, to take on the White House with such ferocity is a political event of note, whatever its literary merits."
Washington Post Book World - Patrick Anderson (01/12/2004)
"One of the most striking features of ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is its ambition, which can be measured across any number of dimensions. It is not just [le Carré's] willingness to carry his characters through the whole of the postwar era--an endeavor not too many novelists could carry off with as much grace as le Carré musters....More important, however, is le Carre's steady and masterful interweaving of the personal and the public, political lives of both Mundy and Sasha....ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is...a novel that reaches vastly beyond the genre fiction for which le Carré is noted. But he deploys all the best features of his espionage novels to make his new book as effective as it is."
Nation - Patrick Smith (01/26/2004)
"ABSOLUTE FRIENDS, the latest novel from a writer now in his seventies...unfolds, like the best thrillers, a devastating and phantasmagoric finale expressive of our times....Le Carré brilliantly manipulates an absorbing plot to give the reader a masterly tour d'horizon of Cold War Europe. The veteran student of Germany revels in his portrait of a reunited society painfully recovering from the terrible wounds of history.....[B]ursting with a satirical indignation that is sometimes grimly comic, le Carré brings the thriller face to face with contemporary politics and, in the process, has once again demonstrated his mastery of his chosen genre while at the same time giving lesser, ordinary novelists a masterclass in taking nothing for granted."
Guardian (London) - Randy McCrum (12/07/2003)
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