Legacy - Softcover

First new novel for many years from the prize-winning author of best-selling A Breed of Heroes. Legacy is the first novel of a new spy trilogy based on friendship and working relationship between the two central characters.

Alan Judd is the author of the best-selling A Breed of Heroes ( over 100,000 copies sold, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Royal Society of Literature Award for fiction). It was also turned into a very popular and well-regarded TV film. His Fordian novella The Devil’s Own Work is regarded as his most original and accomplished work (it won the Guardian Fiction Prize) and his biography of Ford Madox Ford won the Royal Society of Literature Award for biography and the Heinemann Award. He is extraordinarily well-connected in the world of literature, very highly thought of, and a very fine journalist.

The chief protagonist of Alan’s autobiographical novel A Breed of Heroes was Charles Thorougood. Charles is resurrected in the new novel as an agent of MI6 working in London during the Cold War, with a young Soviet assistant. Unexpectedly he learns of a strange legacy left to him by his estranged father, the implications of which are much darker than expected at first. Charles and his Russian associate begin to uncover information about a Soviet plot to dump dangerously toxic and nuclear substances on mainland Britain. The Soviet operation is code-named Legacy.

The book is based mainly in London at the end of the Cold War. It is a spy thriller full of unexpected twists. Le Carre’s novels saw espionage as a metaphor for the treacherousness and helplessness of the human heart and Alan builds on this theme with his new novel also showing how intrinsic and close the world of espionage is to everyday life.

Charles Thoroughgood is in training for M16. He's learning about spy craft, how to handle agents and de-code secret messages, how to spot enemy surveillance and set up clandestine meetings. None of this prepares him for an unexpected inheritance left to him by his dead father, the implications of which are much darker than first expected. This legacy leads him back to an old student friendship with Viktoe, a Russian diplomat working in London and sets him on a trail deep into the murky world of Soviet espionage and the nuclear tensions of the cold war.

Legacy is a triumphant return to fiction for Alan Judd. His last novel, The Devil's Own Work – a chilling Fordian fable – was admired widely when published and went on to win the Guardian fiction prize. Legacy picks up the themes of Judd's earlier spy novels in that it is a book rooted in real experience which, through great storytelling and intricate characterisation, reflects the shifting loyalties, inherent absurdity, and potential for treachery so central to the world of espionage.