John le Carré was born in Dorset in 1931 and was educated at Sherborne School and the University of Berne, before reading modern languages at Oxford University. He taught at Eton from 1956-58, then spent five years in the British Foreign Service until 1964. He started writing in 1961, and his first novel, a spy thriller, was Call for the Dead, later made into the film The Deadly Affair starring James Mason. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works. Absolute Friends is an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal set in the West Berlin of the 1960s through to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. Ted Mundy, the Pakistan-born son of a British army officer, who as a student becomes proficient in the German language. He joins a 1960s-era student protest group in West Berlin and becomes a lifelong friend of a West German student anarchist named Sasha. Having been brutally beaten by West Berlin police and ejected from Germany, Mundy fails at several careers. Eventually, Mundy obtains a position with the British Council. Meanwhile, Sasha has defected to East Germany to become a member of the notorious Stasi secret police. On a trip to East Germany with a youth theatre group, Mundy and Sasha meet again. By this time Sasha has become totally disillusioned with the Communist Bloc and enlists the naïve Mundy to become a double agent… Enjoy free online English audiobook “Absolute Friends”, a novel by John le Carré.
