Acclaimed espionage writer Nick Harkaway has revealed plans for a second George Smiley continuation novel, promising it won’t be as “glamorous” as James Bond.
The 52 year old Cornwall native is the son of John le Carre, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 89 and was the original author of the spy series featuring an intelligence officer working for The Circus, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency.
Harkaway, whose real name is Nicholas Cornwell, released his first continuation novel, Karla’s Choice, last year.
He confessed: “Last time I was kind of deliberately unaware of how much pressure there actually was.
“I sort of sat down (to write) and didn’t really think about it. And then, after I finished, and as the reviews started to come out and they were positive, I got retrospective terror.
“I realised… and particularly when you read the reviews, what you realise is that all of them begin with ‘I really expected to hate this book, and I don’t’. And I thought ‘Gosh, that would have been really awful’.”
He added: “There’s a lot of reasons why it shouldn’t work… So I think everybody had sort of legitimate fear, and I have great respect for that.”
In the upcoming novel, The Taper Man, George Smiley is dispatched on his first mission to America to track an old communist network across the West Coast.
“We have Smiley going to America, to the United States, for the first time, into the kind of culmination of the Civil Rights decade,” Harkaway explained.” It’s a period of massive, massive, tumultuous change, and not all of The era wasn’t all peace and love – there were some quite extraordinary acts of domestic terrorism in the early ’60s, particularly around desegregation.
“It’s a deep dive, and I’m kind of daunted by it, but you do these things with respect, and you feel your way, and you learn,” he expressed.
The novel is set in 1965, a year and a half after Karla’s Choice, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.
“I’m not just writing to the 1960s, I’m also writing to the world of George Smiley and he’s not the guy who shows up at a Beatles concert,” Harkaway explained.
“We’re not going to see the kind of glamorous ’60s that you see in a James Bond film from the period; we’re going to be looking at, always, the shadows and the grey spaces and the places where things have potential to go seriously wrong.
“And looking for somebody who can potentially make them go right, and will that person be heard? It’s always about ambiguity, rather than the kind of acid orange of the ’60s.”
In other news, it has been announced that The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, a global best-selling thriller penned by Harkaway’s father, is set to make its West End debut this November.
Harkaway shared: “I am excited about that… I have seen the play. I saw it at Chichester, and it runs on rails towards the kind of inevitable, staggering conclusion of the story… It’s incredibly powerful.”
Le Carre, whose real name was David Cornwell, authored best-selling novels including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager.
Prior to embarking on his writing career, he served in British intelligence during the 1950s and 1960s. His most renowned character, the career intelligence officer Smiley, was brought to life by Alec Guinness in the late 1970s TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Film adaptations of Le Carre’s novels include The Tailor Of Panama (2001), featuring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis; The Constant Gardener (2005), with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz; and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Tom Hardy.
Harkaway has penned novels such as The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, Gnomon and The Price You Pay (under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen).
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is set to run at Soho Place from 17 November 2025 until 21 February 2026.