John Le Carre, A Most Wanted Man

John Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man. This story revolves around a young illegal immigrant, an elderly banker, and a human rights lawyer in Hamburg. It's a dissection of the chaos in the intelligence world post 9/11, as well as human rights, law, and morality. By now I ought to know what is coming when I read Le Carré (let's just say I don't expect a happy ending), but I can never guess just how things will go wrong. I love all these books. They have similar themes and even characters, but are all beautifully crafted. The similarity is that each person is utterly lonely, and the central threads of love, generosity, and choice. He keeps writing these wistful books, and they keep getting better. Authors that keep writing after they are sick of their characters and their forms, but go on anyway and write terrible books (I'm thinking Martha Grimes) are more than disappointing. Le Carré is most emphatically not in that category. Another lovely thing about him is that each of his books is thoroughly researched and embedded in the world at the time of his writing, but not in such a way that is forced or didactic.