Penguin Michael Joseph scoops Alistair Wood's My Family and Other Spies

Penguin Michael Joseph (PMJ) publishing director, Rowland White, has acquired My Family and Other Spies by Alistair Wood, publishing in spring 2025.  

White acquired British and Commonwealth rights from Charlie Viney at The Viney Agency.

Billed as “part memoir of a unique childhood and part investigation into the singular life of his father, MI6 spy J B Wood” the book shines a light on Cold War history. 

Both of Wood’s parents worked for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Following their divorce, he and his brother lived with their mother inside a secret SIS training camp. Meanwhile, his father’s career in espionage took him from Nazi Germany to war time South America, and from a divided Berlin to the fall of Saigon, no more than glimpsed at by his sons during occasional visits home, PMJ said. “When after his father’s death – and encouraged by the former head of SIS’s Russian department – he sets out to investigate, he discovers that the remarkable truth was stranger than any fiction,” the publisher added. 

Wood said: “Espionage-wise I had a privileged upbringing, having grown up within the four (very high) walls of the SIS training camp. My Family & Other Spies is in part a memoir of an improbable childhood, but more especially unveils the life, correction lives – of one of the more colourful characters in SIS history and – in an admittedly crowded field – one of its most enjoyably duplicitous: my own father.” 

White added: “Wry, revealing, sometimes jaw-dropping and often very funny, Alistair has woven vivid personal memories of his extraordinary, eccentric family with meticulous enquiry to paint a gripping portrait of half a century of espionage and his father’s part in it. It’s a secret world of dead drops and duplicity that will be familiar to fans of le Carré but, in his father, J B Wood, Alistair has given us a character that any novelist would have been hard pushed to get away with.”