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Absolute Friends by John le Carre

Absolute Friends tells the story of two friends in the spy trade, Ted Mundy who works for British Intelligence, and Sasha, a Stasi double agent who passes him information. The story follows Mundy's life from a childhood in Pakistan, public school in England, and his adult life in Germany. He first meets Sasha at the height of the Cold War, and their friendship continues through the fall of the Berlin Wall to the war in Iraq. They both get involved with a philanthropist who wants to create an alternative university to counter anti-war propaganda, but Mundy soon discovers it's not quite what it seems. John le Carré is one of the master storytellers of the spy genre and Absolute Friends has received mixed reviews. The New Zealand Herald says, "This is an extraordinarily passionate novel: it's bitter about human self-deception and hypocrisy, heart-rending about loneliness, excoriating in its denunciation of the war in Iraq and the multiple deceptions governments and corporations practise on people."