Larger	Absolute Friends Author: John le Carre
	Book Information Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Book Type: Hardcover Rating: 14 ISBN-13: 9780316000642 - ISBN-10: 0316000647 Publication Date: 1/12/2004 Pages: 453 Book Reviews

A FEROCIOUS NEW NOVEL FROM THE MASTER: WHEN A MAN'S GOOD HEART IS HIS WORST ENEMY... By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy eternal striver, failed writer, and expatriate son of a Britsh Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days, when a cinder-block wall divided Berlin and the enemy was easy to recognize. Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the cripple Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer, and choas addict. After years of twawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturerer, Sasha has yet again discover the true, the only, answer to life - this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they? Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparantly noble venture reek less of stary idealism than of treachery and fear? Some gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could. In ABSOLUTE FRIENDS, John le Carre' delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre' fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.