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    A Delicate Truth: A Novel
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    A Delicate Truth: A Novel
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    A Delicate Truth: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    A Delicate Truth: A Novel

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

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    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations."-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

    A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar.  Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister's personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it.

    Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be-or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher "Kit" Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit's daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9781101620649
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for A Delicate Truth

    4/5

    324 ratings33 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A perfectly okay political thriller, but not up to the high level of some of le Carré's other books. 
    • 5/5
      Very good. But the plot seems disproportionate. It seems like this kind of bungling would be a dime a dozen, and not warrant the extremes of cover up we see here. The way it escalates would be more appropriate to an attempt to assassinate a senior government official who tries to blow the whistle on a false flag operation that was used to start a war.
    • 4/5
      The audio version is read by the author and is incredibly well done. Le Carre is quite a skilled actor and uses a variety of accents and subtleties of voice to differentiate characters. The story is freaking awesome. As with most Le Carre that I've read, I had no earthly idea what was going on for several discs. But when the pieces begin to fall into place, the story roars to life and it is clear what a wonderful writer he really is. Le Carre requires commitment and if you are willing to give him your undivided attention, he will reward you with a thrilling tale of espionage that will stay with you long after the book ends. EXCELLENT READ
    • 2/5
      I wish I could like these LeCarre books...but I just can't relate to all this "British-isms"....the book is OK.
    • 4/5
      One of the things I love about le Carre' is the sense of characters lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth, and the reader is just as confused as they are, at least for awhile. The downside of this theme is that all can seem hopeless and doomed. In A Delicate Truth, le Carre' gives us a feel for the human in the labyrinth--the person, with a family, a wife, a retirement. It's a more personal, thus perhaps even more real for us. An excellent read by one of the masters.
    • 3/5
      I liked this more than Our Kind of Traitor but was disappointed by the similarly abrupt ending. I'm used to John Le Carre's books having a downbeat conclusion - his most recent novels just seem to shudder to an unsatisfying halt though.
    • 4/5
      An unputdownable Le Carre as usual. A transparent allegory for the joint Anglo American invasion of Iraq and the suicide of David Kelly.
    • 5/5
      A Delicate Truth is truly a thriller. It is about a joint American-British military-private industry anti-terror operation in Gibralter and the aftermath years later. I'm not going to spoil a thing about it except to say that this book is LeCarre at his best. The villains are truly banal, the heroes are trying to do the right thing but don't exactly know what to do.This book has a trailer. It gives a pretty good idea about the book.This book is seriously good. I give it five stars out of five. Get it at the library. I'm a slow reader but I tore through this one in a matter of hours. Get it, read it, try and put it down.
    • 3/5
      cliffhanger ending
    • 3/5
      First time I've seen a happy ending in a le Carre novel. The hero survives and gets the girl. He blows the whistle on the UK government. There's no epilogue so I assume they are immediately caught, the leak denied and they die after being tortured in some CIA facility.
    • 4/5
      A very good story, well-told, but very small.
    • 4/5
      A good one from his late, anti-capitalist period.
    • 5/5
      A really good le Carré, nice tight plot, a relevant and scarily believable story of what can happen when defense-contracts are out-sourced.
    • 3/5
      Not Le Carre's best. The plot is weak. As is usual in his spy stories, Le Carré has created some interesting characters, but his plot on the corporatization of war fails because the evil depicted in the novel just doesn't seem as worrisome as the reality is
    • 2/5
      The audio version read by the author is a nice touch, love his accent. But I put it aside unfinished as I couldn't put in the time for more of the confused process and slow pace.
    • 4/5

      Quite a few le Carre novels fall into that category of books to be reread every couple of years. For me it’s The Spy Who Came in from The Cold", "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "The Perfect Spy" (perhaps his greatest book) I never get tired of them. This one doesn't fall in that category, but it comes very close.

      In German one would say that le Carré is ‘wach’, ie, he really perceives the world around him and has a deep understanding of how its political and power structures work, and how individuals get mixed up in them.

      What surprised me the most (or maybe not), was his ability to keep potential action sequences just offstage. Instead he focused on the moral rot and creeping terror. That in itself is quite a feat in my mind.

      Last but not least, his use of language, and what use it is. In the dialogue, in the narrative, his willingness to explore moral questions and his evocation of time and place are quite marvelous. Le Carré takes the time to create complex, interesting characters and has the knack to building suspense throughout his stories without relying upon all the usual thriller devices that too many crime authors use. Just for that he always rates high in my "book of wonders"."
    • 3/5
      Always a struggle to get through Le carre. No different here. Really proves the fact that the British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.

      As for the plot. Pretty good. Ends badly.
    • 3/5
      A book that takes a tremendous amount of patience and a small amount of expectation to read. Essentially, the entire book revolves around an undercover operation in which an innocent woman and her baby may or may not have been killed. It takes three hundred twenty pages of melodramatic prose to find out the answer and by the time I got to the conclusion I no longer cared. Either this is an "off book" for this celebrated author or his fans are very easily entertained.
    • 4/5
      Bob Dylan is still touring and John Le Carre is still writing books about all kinds of spies--even those who ostensibly serve the Queen. With daily bulletins on just how all-seeing and all-knowing the NSA has become, Le Carre fashions a tale based on a black operation set in motion by faulty information; think of the weapons of mass destruction not found in Baghdad. A rogue minister in a New Labor government sets up a joint public-private rendition of a Jihadist baddie. Only the man isn't there. The book then becomes an examination of what is moral and immoral in the conduct of foreign policy and state security. Is it kosher for someone from Whitehall to accept funding, inspiration, and logistics from a mysterious private sector neo-con American security firm funded by a nutty Fundamentalist right-wing matron? This book is as current as Snowden's latest bulletin about NSA hubris. The fact that it was written by the master of the genre, now well over 80, is a sign that Le Carre's mind is still young and sprightly. There are several tour de force passages, but I thought that the conclusion was a bit compressed and unsatisfying. It can still be said though that the way Le Carre uses the language is as assured and skilled as Rembrandt was with his paint pallette. There is no one who writes as well as this man.
    • 4/5
      Well it's no Smiley and thats a fact. In 'A Delicate Truth',Le Carre tells the story of a clandestine operation, which takes place in Gibraltar,which goes badly wrong. Most of the book involves the efforts of the British Government and the Secret Service to cover up the mistakes of operation 'Wildlife'. There is an uneasy hopping about between past and present and a feeling of unfinished business about it. That is not to say that there is not much to admire here,just that Le Carre is not on top form.
    • 4/5
      At one time I thought "what will LeCarre write about after the Cold War ended?" Well, he's found a lot of themes that resonate with the political milieu of the 21st century and he's still compelling.A Delicate Truth is about a "semi off the books" undertaking to capture a terrorist (a so-called extraordinary rendition) who's been traced to Gibraltar. A British foreign office official is conscripted to observe the commando type action and report to his minister. It's a hush-hush quasi-legal plan that has implicit support of the British and American governments. Orchestrating the operation is a shadowy American defense corporation with ties to a right wing group with wealthy evangelist supporters. The plan utilizes military-style contractors to snatch the suspect from Gibraltar. No surprise that the plan is bungled and the affair is covered up from public exposure. Several years later, the foreign offical and one of the commandos (who was on loan from his British army regiment) discover how wrong the affair went. They embark on an effort to bring the truth to light and in so doing encounter the wrath of the plan's sponsors who are determined to use any means to keep it secret. LeCarre tells us through this story of the worrisome intertwining of governments and private contractors to carry out governmental functions. While one does not always trust governments to act legitimately and honestly, there is, at least in western democracies, the expectation that the public has standing to know and judge the government's actions and that boundaries set through the political processes really matter. The use of corporate entities (who have their own interests at their core) allows actions that transcend the moral constraints of government bodies. That corporations can and will transgress legal and ethical strictures is vividly portrayed through this novel.The dilemma of the book's protagonists is an interesting parallel to Edward Snowden and the NSA revelations. Snowden (who was a private contractor) swore to keep his work secret. His conscience compelled him to break his oath and reveal aspects of intelligence gathering that have shocked the public and would bring about the sanction of the US government, if it could. Was he justified in his action? (To go far back in time, was so-called "Deep Throat" justified in bringing to light the illegal activities of Nixonites?) These are weighty matters that deserve deep thought.
    • 4/5
      John leCarre's tightly-knit plot style is as compelling in this modern thriller as in his Cold War spy novels.
    • 3/5
      Not my usual type of book but it was a free reads book, and they ask if you can write a review of it so that the giveaways can continue.That being said I found it to be a very confusing book as you had to really follow along closly so that you wouldn't miss anything and so I found that it isn't a book or authour I would read again unless I get it as a free readflag
    • 4/5
      Excellent. I could not put this book down. I have read Le Carre from the beginning. Sometimes in recent years, I was not as excited as I was in the past. But this book is so good. Moving quickly, plotted so well, written with insight, purpose and intensity. Makes one wonder and accept that all is never what it might appear to be.
    • 4/5
      Another thinking man's espionage thriller by John le Carre. The plot is about a member of the foreign office investigating a secret rendition in a British territory on his own time. An American company who is involved in the privatization of the intelligence and security services, is the firm that conducts the secret rendition. One of the ministers is working with the company to put an official presence at the site to avoid problems between the US and Britain. The minister joins the private company after the rendition goes sour. The investigation starts after on of the British troops contacts the foreign officer assigned to watch over the rendition about a problem that occurred.As with the George Smiley novels, this is a thinking man's story. There is very little physical action.
    • 5/5
      His best book in years (not that other recent books were anything to sneeze at). Similar to others in that it is an indictment of government, just not with so much outward anti-Americanism this time. He is a master story-teller, and at 82 years old he writes as well as ever. Amazing.Read most of this book on vacation in Paris.
    • 4/5
      Not his brilliant best, but still an entertaining read. A careful look at what could plausibly lie behind the UK government's denial of involvement in extraordinary rendition.As alway with Le Carre, this is a character driven study. In this case we follow two people, one Kit, a quiet member of the Foreign Office, called upon to provide on the scene oversight to a secret mission, and then for the majority of the book, Toby Bell, a Private Secretary to a minister, who learns some facts that he'd rather not. Kit observes a deniable operation whereby British special forces, detached from normal duty, aid an American force of mercenaries on a raid to capture a suspected terrorist looking for information. There is some confusion about the presence of the target, but the raid goes ahead and Kit is assured of the teams' success. Three years later Kit meets, by chance, one of the soldiers on the team , now out of the army, and learns some disquieting facts which he passes to Toby. Together they have to learn a diplomatic way of expressing a delicate truth to those in power - both political and physical. The ending is ambiguous, which is unlike Carre, who normally manages to convey a clear sense of where the inequities might be.This is yet another of LeCarre's looks at the role corporations have within the political intelligence scene within both the UK and the US. How much of this is 'true' is a debatable point, which I guess is Le Carre's idea - to make readers think about what may underlie the brief sentences that make the national news. His writing is always slow and studied, there are no dramatic actions scenes but he does convey the tensions and doubts of the key players admirably well. It is however a brief and somewhat simplistic story. We only get one side of the events, and have no idea as to the actual truth that occurred. There is little devious plotting, merely a mostly faceless shadow that opposes them, with no stated motive. One can suppose a lot of things, as the 'heroes' do. Kit's wife is frequently stated as being ill, but no name or symptoms are ever given and it is far from clear why or what she is suffering from, or how this should effect Kit.Not his best, but still very readable and casts doubts, as ever, on the UK political scene.
    • 5/5
      There has been a lot of media attention recently on John le Carre to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his classic espionage novel "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" which was later filmed with Richard Burton giving a marvellous performance as Alec Leamas. Fifty years on and le Carre has lost none of his touch, and his latest book shows that casual mastery of plot, character and political context that has marked all of his finest work.The book opens with a senior if unexceptional Civil Servant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) being asked to go to Gibraltar under cover (as "Paul Anderson"), and to act as direct contact for maverick New Labour Minister, Fergus Quinn, who has been prevailed upon to become more directly involved in operational matters than can ever be prudent. Having languished in boredom for a couple of days, Paul is suddenly called upon to act, and becomes embroiled at the sharp end of a stakeout of a prime suspect in the War Against Terror.We then move back to London where Toby Bell, aspiring fast streamer within the FCO, recently appointed Private Secretary to Quinn, is contemplating risking his career, and possibly his freedom, by indulging in his own act of espionage by secretly recording one of Quinn's meetings. Quinn has been his own man, and contrary to prevailing practice has striven to exclude officials in general, and Bell in particular, from most of his meetings, and Bell has come to resent it. He vacillates over a whole weekend, "letting I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat i' th'adage", but as we know from the start he must, he does indeed screw his courage to the sticking point and makes the clandestine recording.When he comes to listen to his secret recording Bell is appalled by what he hears, and finds himself plunged into the depths of conspiracy theorising. And then he finds himself transferred to a posting in Beirut with next to no notice. When he returns to Lodon three years later he finds that Quinn has moved on as part of the ceaseless tide of ministerial appointment that raises some while drawing others down. Bell starts to believe that his recklessness of three years before might have come to nothing, and that he can continue the pursuit of his career without further cause for concern.And then "Paul" writes him a note ...Le Carre obviously knows his material inside out, and this novel is as resonant as any of his canon with that unique prose style. The plot is watertight and, above all, utterly plausible. All of the characters her portrays are completely credible, and, sadly, I doubt whether many people nowadays would struggle too hard to believe that the government could behave in such a cavalier and disingenuous manner. Another winner.
    • 4/5
      The plot is absurd. The characters are stock figures out of central casting and absurd even on their own terms. Forget if you agree with the author's quite obvious views on America, GWOT, New Labor, the Deep State etc. He has ridden similar hobby horses before and simply done a better job of it. That said, through pacing, an exquisite sense of place [he makes each setting come alive] and his usual genius for dialog, he makes a fun read. Sadly not fun enough that I do not somewhat regret paying full price for an HC. With hindsight, I should have waited for my local library to get a copy. However, Hollywood will love making this movie as it does wonderfully nasty sendups of black ops, the W years and evangelical millionaire neocons.
    • 5/5
      This is a book about the possibilities of moral relativism. The characters are all compromised in their own ways, and the story concerns how they compromise further and to what degree. Le Carre plays a lot of engaging tricks with time in the narrative. In a way, time takes the place of the Soviet Union - it is the new monolith against which the individual struggles to keep their integrity intact. Le Carre subtly paints a picture of the world in which all values are potentially undermined, and his open-ended conclusion fits this viewpoint perfectly.