The Mission Song.

JOHN le CARRE

Publication: Hodder and Stoughton, 2006, London

First edition. 8vo. Limited edition of 1500 numbered copies signed by the author. As new, in pictorial boards with metallic-stamping as issued. Issued simultaneously with the first edition and housed in a matching pictorial slipcase with no dust jacket, as issued, still in the original publisher's shrink wrap. Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent, twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love-child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese headman's daughter. Educated first at mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu, and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor Brother Michael to train as a professional interpreter in the tribal dialects of Africa. Soon a rising star in his profession, he is brought into the mushrooming overworld of British Intelligence. At the same time, he is courted and won by the all-white, Surrey-born Penelope, star reporter on one of our great national newspapers, whom with typical impulsiveness he promptly marries. Dispatched to a no-name island in the North Sea to attend a top-secret meeting between Western financiers and East Congolese warlords, Salvo is obliged to interpret matters never intended for his re-awakened African conscience.