British novelist Sebastian Faulks has written a new James Bond novel to mark the centenary of creator Ian Fleming's birth, Fleming's family announced Wednesday.

The new 007 adventure, Devil May Care, will be published May 28, 2008, on what would have been Fleming's 100th birthday. The Fleming estate said the novel is set during the Cold War and involves espionage across two continents in "several of the world's most thrilling cities."

The family announced last year that it had commissioned a "well known and highly respected" writer to create a new adventure for the suave superspy, but had kept the author's identity secret.

Speculation had centred on thriller writers including John LeCarre and Frederick Forsyth.

Faulks, 54, is best known for a trilogy of novels set in France — The Girl at the Lion d'Or, the First World War saga Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, a Second World War  Resistance story that was made into a movie starring Cate Blanchett. 

Faulks said he was surprised but flattered to have been chosen.

Rereading Fleming's novels, he said, "I was surprised by how well the books stood up." 

"I put this down to three things: the sense of jeopardy Fleming creates about his solitary hero; a certain playfulness in the narrative details; and a crisp, journalistic style that hasn't dated," Faulks said.

Faulks said his book's style was "about 80 per cent Fleming."  

"I didn't go the final distance for fear of straying into pastiche, but I strictly observed his rules of chapter and sentence construction. My novel is meant to stand in the line of Fleming's own books, where the story is everything.

"I hope people will enjoy reading it and that Ian Fleming would consider it to be in the cavalier spirit of his own novels and therefore an acceptable addition to the line," he added.  

First introduced in 1953

Fleming, a journalist and wartime intelligence officer, introduced James Bond in Casino Royale in 1953.

The stylish, womanizing spy went on to appear in 13 more books, the last of which, Octopussy and the Living Daylights, was published in 1966, two years after Fleming's death.  

Other writers have since written Bond books, including Kingsley Amis — who published Colonel Sun in 1968 under the pseudonym Robert Markham — and Charlie Higson, who imagines the spy as a teenager in his series of Young Bond novels.

Corinne Turner, managing director of the family-owned Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., said the family was delighted with Faulks's manuscript and that Barbara Broccoli, producer of the Bond films, had been impressed by its verisimilitude. 

There was no word on whether Devil May Care would be filmed. All Fleming's original Bond novels have been turned into movies, most recently last year's Casino Royale.

Devil May Care will be published in Britain by Penguin and in the United States by Doubleday.