A Small Town in Germany

In the late 1960s, in the town of Bonn, capital of West Germany, a British Embassy officer by the name of Leo Harting goes missing—and forty-three confidential-or-higher files with him.

Dispatched from the British Foreign Office to investigate, Alan Turner arrives in Bonn to find riots, protests, and a tenuous balance of power. As if there isn’t enough pressure, the embassy’s head of Chancery, Rawley Bradfield, makes it clear he has no intentions of making Turner’s investigation an easy one.

As Turner peels back the layers of chaos and desperation swirling around Bonn and the British Embassy, and grows ever closer to understanding the missing Leo Harting, he begins to uncover a web of deceit and corruption that threatens to upend British interests in Western Europe.

A “political ghost story,” as author John le Carré himself put it, A Small Town in Germany marks the first of his works taking place outside the realm of George Smiley’s Circus. Examining both geopolitical and psychological tensions—and where the two intersect—le Carré weaves yet another masterful spy thriller.