Adapted into the 1959 film starring Alec Guinness, this Telegraph Top 20 Spy Novel of All Time is "high-comic mayhem . . . [and] bizarrely prescient" (Christopher Buckley, New York Times–bestselling author).
James Wormold, a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, finds the answer to his prayers when British Intelligence offers him a lucrative job as an undercover agent. To keep the checks coming, Wormold must at least pretend to know what he's doing. Soon, he's apparently deciphering incomprehensible codes, passing along sketches of secret weapons that look suspiciously like vacuum parts, and claiming to recruit fellow operatives from his country club, all to create the perfect picture of intrigue.
But when MI6 dispatches a secretary to oversee his endeavors, Wormold fears his carelessly fabricated world will come undone. Instead, it all comes true. Somehow, he's become the target of an assassin, and it's going to take more than a fib to get out of Cuba alive. Her Majesty's man in Havana may have to resort to spying.
Praise for Graham Greene
"A masterly storyteller . . . An enormously popular writer who was also one of the most significant novelists of his time." —Newsweek
"Graham Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature." —John le Carré, New York Times–bestselling author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
"One of the finest writers of any language." —The Washington Post
