Penguin Readers Level 6: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

Description

Alec Leamas, a tired, worn out British spymaster, has retired. His boss, however, believes he has one last job in him and sends him to East Germany to spread false information about a powerful East German intelligence officer. Can Agent Leamas end his career of espionage and finally come in from the cold, or will the opportunity to take revenge on old enemies prove irresistible?

Penguin Readers is a series of the best new fiction, essential non-fiction and popular classics written for learners of English as a foreign language. Beautifully illustrated and carefully adapted, the series introduces language learners around the world to the bestselling authors and most compelling content from Penguin Random House. The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework and include language activities that help readers to develop key skills.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a Level 6 Reader, is B1+ in the CEFR framework. The longer text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing future continuous, reported questions, third conditional, was going to and ellipsis. A small number of illustrations support the text.

Author Biography

One of the greatest spy novelists of all time, John le Carré was born in 1931. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People all featuring his most famous character, George Smiley, the quintessential Cold War operative. An antidote to Fleming’s racier James Bond, Smiley is cool, thoughtful, somewhat academic and (superficially) “breathtakingly normal” with a somewhat ambivalent attitude to the Service and its efficacy. His other novels, thrillers which range widely covering variously political issues of the arms trade, modern conflict and drug-trafficking, include: A Most Wanted Man, Our Kind of Traitor, A Delicate Truth and the recently adapted The Night Manager. His only work of non-fiction, The Pigeon Tunnel, was a Number One bestseller in 2016.