Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | How to Listen

Before the spy novelist John le Carré died in 2020, he extracted a promise from his son Nick Harkaway -- also a novelist -- to finish the manuscript that le Carré had been working on. Harkaway did, and the resulting book was published in 2021 as "Silverview." Harkaway figured that, as far as continuing his father's work, that was that.

But then -- just like the ambivalent, reluctant spies le Carré wrote about so well -- Harkaway was pressed back into service. His new novel, "Karla's Choice," centers on the great le Carré protagonist George Smiley, and is set in the time period between le Carré's novels "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" and "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

Harkaway visits the podcast this week to discuss the book with the host Gilbert Cruz, and explains how he was persuaded to pick up the mantle again.

"I had actually decided I wouldn't do it," he says. "We'd had a conversation as a family about things that we might do to achieve the thing our father wanted, which was -- in the will, he said, 'Make sure people keep reading my books.' And one of the ways that you can do that is to write new books or to have new books. And so I had a little mental list of people who would write amazing George Smiley, new, different George Smiley. And I was about to start expounding on all these brilliant ideas I had. And my brother Simon said, There's quite a strong logic that it should be you. And I said, Yeah, but come on, OK, let's talk seriously. Who are we going to get? And he said, No, let me rephrase. Will you do this? And in that moment, all the reasons that you have why you shouldn't do it -- that it's my father's universe, that it's this extraordinary piece of 20th-century fiction that's definitive of the Cold War for a lot of people -- they become the reasons you should."

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].