Exquisitely calibrated, devastating, frightening and heartbreaking, John le Carre’s eighteenth novel opens with the lurid murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near Northern Kenya’s Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has disappeared. Tessa’s much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. What he might know and what he ultimately learns make him suspect among his own colleagues and a target for the same ruthless profiteers who killed his wife.
A master at portraying the myriad deceits and betrayals within a misguided foreign office, le Carre delves even deeper, in THE CONSTANT GARDENER, into the potential perils of unbridled capitalism. It is, as well, a profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, an amateur gardener, seemingly oblivious to the political machinations around him and to his wife’s cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary depths of the woman he barely had time to love.
THE CONSTANT GARDENER is a masterful exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.
