Absolute Friends, John le Carre
Absolute Friends, John le Carre
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Absolute Friends

Author: John le Carré

Narrator: John le Carré

Abridged: 6 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/01/2005

Synopsis

Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer, and chaos addict. After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only, answer to life-this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they? Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than of treachery and fear? Some gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could.

In Absolute Friends, John le Carre delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.

About John Le Carré

John le Carré (1931 – 2020), born David John Moore Cornwell, was a British-Irish author. He spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld; at sixteen, he found refuge first at the University of Bern, then Oxford. After graduating with honors, he taught at Eton for two years before he was recruited into British Intelligence. In 1961, while still an MI6 agent, he published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, which introduced the world to George Smiley. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, spent 32 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and earned him a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent spy novelists. Though he declined all British-based honors and prizes, he accepted the Premio Malaparte (Italy) in 1988, the title of Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2005, and the Goethe Medal (Germany) in 2011. Over the course of sixty years, he published over two dozen novels that would come to define an age; his final novel, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Supratim on September 01, 2019

I recently finished a non-fiction book on espionage The Unending Game: A Former R&AW Chief’s Insights into Espionage which had multiple references to John Le Carre novels. The author, a former head of RAW, the Indian secret service clearly is a fan of Le Carre’s writing and his realistic portrayal o......more

Goodreads review by Lisabet on April 01, 2019

Less morally ambiguous than many of le Carre's books, ABSOLUTE FRIENDS makes it very clear who is the enemy. Gripping, moving and as tightly written as all his novels, taking in a huge sweep of history. This is literature - not just spy fiction!......more

Goodreads review by Susan on September 24, 2018

Friends come and go in your life but on rare occasions there is a special bond between two people, a friendship that lasts over decades. That was how it was with Ted Mundy and Sasah. Mundy I felt was a man who didn’t seem to belong anywhere, like he had no roots that he felt at home with, so when he......more

Goodreads review by Nigeyb on May 20, 2020

I'm a big fan of John le Carré and I am steadily working my way through all his novels. Absolute Friends (2003) is another masterclass from JLC. A really satisfying and provocative trawl through the post war intelligence world which brings the reader right up to the War on Terror. The absolute friend......more

Goodreads review by Mark on January 22, 2009

Calling John le Carre a spy novelist is liking calling Shakespeare a jingle writer. Nevertheless, there was something about this book that bothered me enough to knock one star off my otherwise high regard, and I think I can discuss it without issuing a spoiler alert. First, the basics: Ted Mundy is a......more

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