Nick Harkaway, the gonzo science fiction novelist now keeping his father’s George Smiley alive

Nick Harkaway has spent most of his career writing novels that are hard to summarise at a dinner party: a post-apocalyptic adventure full of ninjas and long-haul truckers, a London caper built around a clockwork doomsday machine, a surveillance-state mystery the size of a breeze block. This autumn a much wider audience is arriving from two directions at once. Catherine Zeta-Jones is on Prime Video as a woman hunted by a squad of assassins in Kill Jackie, the first television series adapted from one of his books, and next month he publishes his second George Smiley novel, returning to the secret world his father built.

Harkaway is a pen name. He was born Nicholas Cornwell, the youngest son of David Cornwell, who signed his own books John le Carré. The son chose a different name and a very different corner of the bookshop, building a reputation in science fiction and crime before he ever went near the Circus. Since his father’s death he has done something few literary heirs attempt: he writes new Smiley novels himself, with both names on the cover.

He was born in Cornwall on 26 November 1972, the child of le Carré’s second marriage, to Jane Eustace. He was educated at University College School in north London and read philosophy, sociology and politics at Clare College, Cambridge. He worked in the film industry before turning to fiction. He is married to Clare Algar, a lawyer who is managing director of John le Carré Ltd, and they have two children.

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His debut, The Gone-Away World, came out from Heinemann in June 2008 under a title that had started life as The Wages of Gonzo Lubitsch. It imagines a war fought with bombs that make matter simply go away, leaving behind a residue that turns human thoughts into living things. What is left of humanity huddles along a single pipeline run by a corporation, and the narrator and his best friend Gonzo, former special forces men turned emergency truckers, are hired to put out a fire on it. The book mixes slapstick, kung fu and grief in roughly equal measure. It was nominated for the BSFA Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and readers have been passing it hand to hand ever since.

Angelmaker (2012) moved the madness to London. Joe Spork, a clock repairer trying to live down his late father’s gangland career, switches on an antique device that could end the world and finds himself allied with Edie Banister, a former secret agent now nearly ninety. The novel won the Kitschies Red Tentacle and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2013. Tigerman (2014) followed a British sergeant stationed on Mancreu, a poisoned island in the Arabian Sea scheduled for destruction, who puts on a homemade costume and becomes a vigilante for the sake of a comic-obsessed local boy. In between, Harkaway published The Blind Giant (2012), a non-fiction study of digital life, and became a vocal critic of the Google Book Search settlement.

Gnomon (2017) is his most ambitious book. In a near-future Britain governed by constant direct democracy and watched by an all-seeing system called the Witness, Inspector Mielikki Neith investigates the death in custody of Diana Hunter, a reclusive novelist whose mind was searched by machine. Instead of a confession the interrogators found other people: an alchemist in ancient Carthage, a Greek banker haunted by a shark, an Ethiopian painter in modern London. It is a detective story about surveillance that keeps asking who gets to tell the story of a life.

Under a second pen name, Aidan Truhen, he wrote The Price You Pay (2018) and Seven Demons (2021), a pair of savagely funny crime novels narrated by Jack Price, a London cocaine dealer who runs his business like a gig-economy app and finds an elite team of assassins sent after him. Kill Jackie, which premiered on Prime Video on 2 October in the UK, Ireland and several European markets, turns Jack into Jackie Price, an art dealer with a smuggling past. Writer Tom Butterworth runs the eight-episode series, with Ron Perlman and Sidse Babett Knudsen in the cast.

He returned to his own name with Titanium Noir (2023), a hard-boiled mystery in which a drug called T7 makes the very rich younger and physically bigger with every dose. Its detective, Cal Sounder, specialises in crimes involving these giants. The New York Times Book Review called it “an exemplar of its genre”, and Cal came back in Sleeper Beach (2025), investigating the death of a young woman washed up on the shore of a run-down holiday town split by strikes.

Then came Smiley. After le Carré died in December 2020, his son described the family’s duty as “an obligation to try to keep the books read, to keep the name alive, but, more than anything else, to keep the books in circulation.” It was his brother who suggested he write a Smiley novel. Karla’s Choice, published by Viking on 24 October 2024 and billed as “a John le Carré novel”, is set in 1963, between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A retired Smiley is pulled back to find a missing Hungarian literary agent in London, and the trail leads towards the origins of Karla, his Soviet nemesis. Harkaway has said he “learned writing from him by osmosis, but we never really talked about writing very much.”

The Taper Man, due from Viking on 5 November, moves to 1965. A British agent is shot in Helsinki, the Circus’s last great asset in Moscow is in danger, and Smiley follows the trail to Los Angeles, hunting a Communist sleeper inside American intelligence. Read together, Harkaway’s books share an obsession with systems that swallow people and the stories people tell to survive them. That he now works inside the most famous system his father ever invented is a turn worthy of one of his own plots.

Tags: novelists, writers, John le Carré, Nick Harkaway, Gnomon, Karla's Choice

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