John le Carre · 1983 · thriller

John le Carre's 1983 novel. Israeli intelligence needs someone the other side will believe, and recruits an English actress with radical sympathies and no experience. They build her a false love affair with a dead man and send her into a Palestinian network - and the book is careful to let both sides make their case at full strength.

1. 1
   London

   Charlie is a moderately successful actress with fashionable politics and an unfashionable amount of feeling, and is watched for months by people who conclude that she is exactly what they need - which is to say, believable.

2. 2
   Mykonos

   On a Greek island she is picked up by a man she takes for a chance acquaintance, and is then taken to a house in Athens and shown, over days, that everything about the last fortnight has been staged for her.

3. 3
   Munich

   The fiction is built in Europe: a car driven across borders with explosives in it, a hotel room, a set of letters written to a man she has never met - the theatre of the real, as her handler calls it.

4. 4
   Beirut

   Delivered into the Palestinian camps and the training in Lebanon, Charlie finds the people she was sent to betray making an argument she cannot dismiss - and the operation succeeds at a cost the book will not call worth it.