John Le Carré interview

In The Sunday Telegraph, John Le Carré revals how a research trip influenced the writing of his new novel The Mission Song.

It was the strangest journey of my life and it always will be. I was looking for fictional characters I had invented, in a country I had never visited. The distant town of my imagination was Bukavu in the eastern Congo, known formerly as Costermansville and built in the early 20th century by Belgian colonialists. It stands at the southern end of Lake Kivu, at 1500 metres the highest and coolest of all Africa's Great Lakes.