Get Ready for The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

In 1940, Winston Churchill merged three secret government departments into a new intelligence organisation tasked with carrying out irregular warfare: reconnaisance, espionage, and sabotage. He named it the Special Operations Executive.

Irregular warfare required irregular warriors. The SOE used assets that the armed forces and other intelligence agencies considered worthless - or, worse, dangerous.

Criminals. Homosexuals. Women.

Many of their missions were wildly successful.
A great number of agents lost their lives.
In 1946, the SOE was disbanded.

Officially.

In 2025, their warfare is still ungentlemanly.

Thankfully, so are they.

Charlie Hart is a freshly graduated engineer with a healthy lack of respect for No Entry signs. Her biggest problems in life are workplace misogyny and the illegality of her urban exploration hobby. But when her family is kidnapped right out of the heart of London, her world is flipped upside down by the suave asshole of a spy whose job it is to get them back.

Charlie is drawn into a world of misfits and irregulars working for an intelligence agency that doesn’t officially exist. The Special Operations Executive was consigned to history’s rubbish bin in 1946, and so far as most people know it stayed there. Now it’s Charlie’s only hope of rescuing her family from the megalomaniac billionaire who has taken them from her.

And it turns out he's got a nuclear arsenal that he really wants to use.

Follow now for updates and sneak peeks before the campaign launch in September!

Learn more about the characters, read preview chapters, have your say in our stretch goals, and more as we prepare to launch as part of Booktopia 2024.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare brings a modern, queer take on the spy thriller, and will be released in 2025... But you can get your hands on a special, Limited Edition copy months ahead of general release, and the more backers we get, the more special we can make the book: stretch goals will include UV Spot Gloss, sprayed edges, and the potential for an even more limited hardback edition!

As this is a teaser page, here are teasers for what (very) early readers have to say about The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare:

"Insanely readable!" - Jackson Ford

"I love this book. I tore through it in two days, and so far its my favorite book of the year." - Martin Stellinga

"Awesome!" - Katrina Middelburg

More to come soon!

Each Booktopia project has a partner, and ours is the phenomenal Dire Contact, a queer supernatural thriller début from J. C. Spark. When you back partnered projects in Booktopia, you will receive an extra free reward from both projects, so check it out here!

This book is unaffiliated with a recent movie of the same name. Oopsie! These things happen when you pull from the same source - in this case, a genuine historical intelligence agency and one of the many nicknames they were known by.

Just goes to show what a great nickname it was!