The Constant Gardener

THE CONSTANT GARDENER

A Novel by JOHN LE CARRE

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carre's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and raveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. 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 profiteers who killed his wife.

A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carre portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.

The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by: SCRIBNER. NEW YORK.

Copyright 2001 by David Cornwell

John le Carre 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 Honorable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People. His novels include The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, Our Game, The Tailor of Panama, and Single and Single. John le Carre lives in Cornwall.

PRAISE FOR JOHN LE CARRE

"Le Carre is more than just a great storyteller. He captures the zeitgeist itself." — TOM WOLFE

"He is one of the half-dozen best novelists now working in English." — CHICAGO SUNTIMES

"A brilliant linguistic artist with a keen eye for the exotic and not-so-exotic locale, a crafty moralizer with an occasional bent for sentiment." — THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"No other contemporary novelist has more durably enjoyed the twin badges of being both well read and well regarded." — SCOTT TUROW

"Le Carre has a great talent for entangling his audience in the sticky tape of complexity, paradox, and irony, and much of the pleasure in his stories is following the same dense, dark path as his characters." — NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Any reader who feared that the end of the Cold War would deprive Mr. le Carre of his subject can now feel a measure of relief. If anything, his subject of East-West misunderstanding has grown richer, and he now possesses vast new territories to mine." — THE NEW YORK TIMES

"He has reinvented the realistic spy story as the supreme theater of paradox, where heroism breeds vice, and virtue is a quite accidental by-product of impudent crimes." — TIME

"Le Carre is one of the best novelists — of any kind — we have." — VANITY FAIR