From the publisher. When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels -- the athleticism of an imagination possessed...

Greene's most extensive attempt to incorporate into fiction what he learned of espionage when recruited by MI6 during World War II.