The Secret Pilgrim (The Penguin John le Carré Hardback Collection)

At the end of the Cold War, Ned, newly demoted to running the training academy, invites his old mentor George Smiley to address a passing-out class of new agents. Smiley speaks without the usual institutional evasions, and his words call up in Ned a lifetime of operational memories spanning Scotland to Cambodia, each carrying its own weight of compromise and doubt. John le Carré's eighth Smiley novel is elegiac and searching, as much a farewell to a spy's world as a thriller.

Simon Vance's narration is a perfect match for le Carré's late style, his measured delivery capturing both the intelligence and the melancholy that the prose requires. The episodic structure, moving through different episodes of Ned's career as Smiley's address triggers them, works particularly well in audio, where Vance's consistent voice provides the connective tissue between otherwise separate memories. At just over twelve hours, this is le Carré at his most reflective.