Books by John le Carré

2. John le Carré, The Naive and Sentimental Lover .  This is supposed to be one of his failed works, and it should have been much shorter, but at least half of it is pretty damned good.  It’s also a classic literary text on attitudes toward business and commerce.  No spies.

As for novels about diplomats, The Constant Gardener comes to mind. The Diplomat's Wife is popular, though I have never read it.  I read the Ender trilogy as about diplomacy as well.  (Is there more from science fiction?  It seems like a good plot device to bring people into contact with alien cultures.)  Carlos Fuentes was himself a diplomat, as were Octavio Paz, Lawrence Durrell, Ivo Andriæ, Pablo Neruda, and Giorgos Seferis.  That's a lot of writer-diplomats and you can add John Kenneth Galbr...