It shows a service fragmented: filled with its own political factions, not always kind to those it should cherish … and ultimately not sure, any more, that it can justify itself.” Silverview centres on a young bookseller, an enigmatic Polish immigrant, and a British agent hunting down a leak.

Julian Lawndsley has left a career in the financial sector in London to open a bookstore in a small seaside town in East Anglia.

He soon becomes entwined with the life of Avon's family: his wife Deborah – also a former top British intelligence agent – who is terminally ill, and his daughter Lily, a single mother.

The Guardian wrote that "the great spy novelist’s final full-length book is a precision-tooled cat and mouse chase from a bookshop in East Anglia to the old eastern bloc.

The review said that "Silverview also feels unfinished—not in its narrative, but in the bits in between major plot points...[it] is more a drinkable blended whiskey than the vintage single malt le Carré completists might have been hoping for".