The Honourable Schoolboy

This is the holiday-house book that started the Smiley journey for me. I struggled with it to begin with due to the very British take on Hong Kong; a cavalcade of caricatures ranging from journalists to military men to spies. But once I settled into it I was surprised to find this was almost the best of the novels so far. The characters are fascinating and flawed, and the scope of the story is enormous both geographically and emotionally. Fairly devastating, again laying waste to the ideal of a glamorous spy, and I felt like a needed to press pause on the series for a while to recover.