George Smiley is back: John Le Carre's Cold War character returns in new novel A Legacy of Spies

John le Carré is bringing back George Smiley after more than 25 years, in new novel A Legacy of Spies.

The character last appeared in the 1991 thriller The Secret Pilgrim and was not expected to return. “I think I’ve done him,” le Carré said in one interview. “The older I got, the more I wanted to write about young people.”

But in a surprise announcement, Penguin Random House said “George Smiley is back” in A Legacy of Spies, to be published on September 7.

That is not to say Smiley is alive and working as a super-annuated spy. Some details of the plot have been disclosed: Peter Guillam, once Smiley’s young Circus colleague, is living out his old age on the family farm in Brittany. He receives a letter from the Secret Service summoning him back to London because “his Cold War past has come back to claim him”.

A new generation “with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications” is scrutinising old intelligence operations. Guillam must revisit the past, and the work he undertook with Smiley.

The publisher said: “Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

Smiley first appeared in the 1961 novel Call for The Dead. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was made into a 1979 BBC television series starring Sir Alec Guinness, and a 2011 film adaptation starring Gary Oldman.

Le Carré, 85, began work on A Legacy of Spies after writing his recent memoir, and submitted the manuscript last summer.

His editor, Mary Mount, said: “Le Carré is very discreet about his work until the day he delivers the finished manuscript, and so I knew very little about the new novel’s story or its setting before I started reading.

“I discovered a novel as tense, as alive, as intricately plotted as his great work, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

“A Legacy of Spies looks back to that novel and to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy while, at the same time, being so very much about the present. It thrills in one moment but is also capable of breaking your heart.

“It is astonishing the way le Carré is able to weave together past and present, to constantly play with what we do and don’t know, what the characters know and don’t know. He is able to define a character absolutely and then unravel him before our eyes.”

The subjects explored in the novel could not be more timely, Mount added. She finished reading the manuscript the day before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. “It seems very wrong that Donald Trump should so constantly intrude in our daily lives but, looking back now, the timing feels significant,” she said.