Our Kind of Traitor
by John le Carre (Viking, £18.99)

Just short of his 80th year, John le Carre is a prodigy, producing his last five novels in less than a decade, a higher average even than in his more youthful years as our nonpareil spy novelist. It may be anger that supplies his energy, for he gives the impression of having got more wrathful as he’s got older: of having become, to borrow the description of a character in his latest novel, “a late-onset, red-toothed radical with balls.” In the past decade he has stepped outside the cloisters of espionage to take shots at dirty capitalism (The Constant Gardener), the Iraq war (Absolute Friends), western neocolonialism and the war on terror (The Mission Song, A Most Wanted Man).

As a result his late novels often return to a model perfected by his mentors, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, a