Agent Running in the Field, the 87-year-old author’s 25th novel, will be set in London and published in October 2019

John le Carré is set to confront “the division and rage at the heart of our modern world” in a new novel set in London in 2018 that will be published next year.

Agent Running in the Field follows a 26-year-old “solitary” man who, “in a desperate attempt to resist the new political turbulence swirling around him, makes connections that will take him down a very dangerous path”, according to publisher Viking.

The novel, Le Carré’s 25th, will be published in October 2019.

Mary Mount, the author’s publisher at Viking, said that the times called for writers like Le Carré. “In his plot and characterisation Le Carré is as thrilling as ever, and in the way he writes about our times he proves himself once again to be the greatest chronicler of our age,” she said. “At a moment like this we need writers like him.”

Agent Running in the Field was the original working title for le Carré’s 1986 novel A Perfect Spy, according to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of the author.

Tinker, tailor, writer, spy: the many lives of John le Carré, in his own words Read more

Le Carré published his first novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961. His most recent, A Legacy of Spies, was released in 2017 and saw the return of his most famous character, George Smiley. Its plot harks back to the cold war and his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, as Smiley’s former disciple Peter Guillam is yanked out of retirement by a call from MI6. It was a No 1 bestseller and John Banville, writing in the Guardian, found that “the ingenuity and skill with which the thing is brought off is breathtaking”.

An adaptation of his 1983 thriller The Little Drummer Girl, centring on attempts to capture a Palestinian terrorist, was televised by the BBC in October.