Nick Harkaway for Karla's Choice: A John le Carre Novel

We are delighted to welcome Nick Harkaway to Bath for Karla's Choice, a John le Carré novel, this October.

It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans.

A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy...

Set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in the George Smiley saga, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Nick Harkaway's Karla's Choice is an extraordinary, thrilling return to the world of spy fiction's greatest writer, John le Carré.

Harkaway is the author of eight novels including The Gone-Away World, Gnomon and Titanium Noir. He has been described as "JG Ballard's geeky younger brother" or "William Makepeace Thackeray on acid", and compared with both Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami. The Guardian said of him that "his great gift as a novelist is to merge the pace, wit and clarity of the best ‘popular’ literature with the ambition, complexity and irony of the so-called ‘literary’ novel”.

Harkaway's real name is Nicholas Cornwell and he is the fourth son of the David Cornwell (who wrote as John le Carré) and his second wife Jane Cornwell. He was born in Cornwall in 1972 and moved to London while he was still a child. He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge, before working in the film industry.

In 2021, after the death of John le Carré, Harkaway took the writer's role in bringing the final unpublished le Carré novel, Silverview, to publication. He said then that the point of the exercise was that he be as invisible as possible. In 2022 he was called upon to do the final necessary work on A Private Spy, the collected edition of his father's letters, after his older brother Tim Cornwell, who was editing the work, sadly died. His other brothers Simon and Stephen Cornwell are the founders of The Ink Factory, the film and TV mini-studio behind The Night Manager TV show. He lives in London with Clare and their two children, and a very needy dog.