His new novel has just been published in the U.S. I bought it from amazon.uk a month ago, after I read reviews in The Economist and the Financial Times.

By the way, buying from amazon.uk is as easy as from the U.S. site, and shipping, surprisingly, is about the same price and speed. I haven't been able to figure out how that happens, but it does. Also, your 1-click stuff, assuming you have it, works seamlessly. As it does with amazon Germany, but I doubt you'll be dealing much with them.

This is the first of Le Carre's novels I've read in which he deviates from his usual dour "a pox on both your dismal houses" atttitude toward the governments of both the West and the East. In the past, when it came down to the utterly cold-blooded, deadly business of spying and intelligence work, there was really hard to choose sides, both seeming equally reprehesible.

In this book, Le Carre's rage at the American dominion over the world as absolute superpower boils over. Last year he wrote a piece which appeared in the Times of London on this very subject, stating that the U.S. had made a decision to take out Saddam Hussein long before there was any proof that he had amassed weapons of mass destruction.

At the time, people derided Le Carre for being delusional, but tonight's "60 Minutes" interview with former U.S. Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill tends to support the Le Carre's thesis. O'Neill, in his just published autobiography, states that the decision to invade Iraq was made just after Bush took office, long before 9-11.

Be that as it may, the book itself is still vintage Le Carre: wonderful characters, a sense of what it's like to be in the business of dark ops and the like.