Smiley's People

Smiley's People is a spy novel by the English writer John le Carre, published in 1979. It is the third and last of the books usually called the Karla Trilogy, after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. The three of them are usually read as one sequence.

George Smiley is brought back from retirement to look into the death of one of his former agents, a former Soviet general who had been running an emigre organisation out of London, and who had been doing it for years before he was killed.

Before he died the general had found something that would lead to a final confrontation with Karla, the Soviet intelligence officer with whom Smiley has been matched for most of his career. The trail begins with a woman in Paris whose daughter she had been forced to leave behind in the Soviet Union, and it runs from her to London and on to Berlin.

The trilogy it concludes is the sequence that made le Carre's name, and Smiley is the character for whom he is best known.