#1 in Spy & espionage
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
- 248
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
- Somerset Maugham Award
- Gold Dagger
- Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel
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Our view
“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is a spy novel almost without gunfire; its tension lives in interrogations and layered deceit. Short and bleak, it shows both sides of the Cold War treating their own people as expendable. Anyone expecting chases will find it slow, and George Smiley stays at the edges, so it reads perfectly well without the other books.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. As with le Carré's previous novels Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, the novel features the fictitious British intelligence organisation, "The Circus", and its agents George Smiley and Peter Guillam.
Reading order · George Smiley series
Full order & progress →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 537 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 79% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Spy & espionage average of 7.6. That is how 8.1 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.3 | 49 | 9% |
| Hardcover | 8.2 | 488 | 91% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold?
It has 248 pages — shorter than 78% of the ranked books in Spy & espionage.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Spy & espionage — with scores between 7.3 and 7.9, closest to this book.
