Viking to publish 'superb' final novel by John le Carré this autumn

Viking will publish a "superb and fitting" final full-length novel by John le Carré, Silverview, this autumn. 

The book will be le Carré's 26th novel, and is released on 14th October, in the week that would have marked le Carré’s 90th birthday.

Le Carré had been working on the book alongside his last two novels, A Legacy of Spies and Agent Running in the Field, both published by Viking. It was le Carré’s wish that his children look after his literary legacy and they, along with an archivist, are currently cataloguing his archive of unpublished work. Silverview was the only complete, full-length, novel left unpublished at the time of his death.

Nick Cornwell, John le Carré’s youngest son and a novelist who writes under the pen name Nick Harkaway, said: "This is the authentic le Carré, telling one more story. The book is fraught, forensic, lyrical, and fierce, at long last searching the soul of the modern Secret Intelligence Service itself. It’s a superb and fitting final novel."

Jonny Geller, John le Carré’s literary agent at Curtis Brown, added: "Reading le Carré’s novel after his passing feels like a gift he has left us. Silverview is as urgent and alive as any of his past work."

Geller told BBC Radio 4's “Today” programme the book was about “an unlikely friendship set in an English seaside town between a man who's fled the city to open a bookshop and a local Polish emigree who lives in the big house called Silverview”. The intelligence services get involved over a leak centring on those two characters, he said.

Mary Mount, le Carré’s publisher at Viking for the last 10 years of his life, described the final work as "mesmerising".

She added: "Beautifully constructed and so acute on the forces – love, loyalty, duty, guilt – that motivate us. It was so thrilling, and very moving, to hear, in these pages, le Carré’s inimitable voice speak once again."

Le Carré was born in 1931 and died on 12th December 2020. He was the author of 26 novels and one work of non-fiction.