Description

A vacuum cleaner salesman becomes a spy by accident and a liar by design.

Jim Wormold lives quietly in pre-revolutionary Havana, selling vacuum cleaners to customers who can scarcely afford them. When a British intelligence officer offers him money to report on local activity, Wormold agrees. His daughter’s expenses demand it.

Lacking real information, he invents it. Diagrams of military installations are drawn from appliance parts. Agents are imagined. Reports are filed. London believes every word.

What begins as improvisation gathers consequence. As his fabrications circulate through intelligence channels, other parties begin to act on them. In a city already thick with tension, fiction proves capable of generating its own danger.

Greene’s espionage novel balances satire with unease, exposing how easily authority can be deceived and how quickly deception can turn fatal.

‘British Intelligence being sent up something rotten’ Daily Telegraph

Publisher Review

As comical, satirical, atmospherical an "entertainment" as he has given us * Daily Telegraph * He had a sharp nose for trouble and injustice. In Our Man In Havana - a witty send-up of an agent's life - it was Cuba before Castro * Financial Times * Nobody should be anywhere near power who hasn't read (or seen the film of) Our Man in Havana, a powerful satire on the silly world of spying by a man who had experienced it * Mail on Sunday * Graham Greene captured a pre-Castro Cuba of daiquiris and decadence... hilarious * Independent * British Intelligence being sent up something rotten * Daily Telegraph, 20 Best Spy Novels of All Time * The human story is warm and the satire made me laugh out loud -- Simon Shepherd * Daily Express *