Legacy - Alan Judd

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.