One of literature's most famous spies is to return.

John le Carré is to publish A Legacy of Spies this year, and is the first novel in more than 25 years to feature George Smiley.

In A Legacy of Spies, published by Viking in September, a story unfolds as a kind of sequel to The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

In the book, Peter Guillam, the "colleague and disciple" of Smiley of the British Secret Service, the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London.

le Carré is the pen name of David Cornwell, who himself worked for the secret services in the 1950s and 1960s.

Smiley was famously depicted on television by Sir Alec Guinness, and recently in a movie by Gary Oldman.

A statement from the publisher said: "The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him.

"Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinised under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications."

The publisher said: "John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"