The pigeon tunnel - John Le Carr

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine-gun fire, or visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, in each event le Carre offers a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.