A Europe fractured into countless tiny nations amidst a series of economic downturns and deadly flu outbreaks. That’s the premise of a new project from the team behind Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy—an adaptation of Dave Hutchinson’s near-future spy thriller series, the Fractured Europe Sequence.
According to Deadline, Studiocanal is teaming up with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy director Tomas Alfredson and writer Peter Straughan to adapt Huchinson’s novels for television.
The series is comprised of four books: Europe in Autumn, Europe at Midnight, Europe in Winter, and Europe at Dawn, all set in a near-future Europe where a series of economic crisis and deadly pandemics have upended the continent, breaking it up into a number of even-smaller territories.
The first novel follows a former cook named Rudi who’s recruited into an organization called Les Coureurs des Bois and trained as a spy, only to get caught in a larger conspiracy when he’s sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and discovers that they’ve been killed.
Europe at Midnight follows another intelligence officer named Jim, dealing with a pocket nation called Campus (which has a lot of schools), mass-killings, and genetic-engineering gone wrong after a routine crime reveals some sort of connection to a strange alternate reality.
The third installment, Europe in Winter, is set in Europe’s now largest city, The Community (which is largely peaceful, having set up a major rail system throughout the region). After a terror attack, Hutchinson brings back Rudi to help solve the case, and delves a bit more into the nature of the micronation and Les Coureurs des Bois.
And finally, there’s Europe at Dawn, which closes out the series with a diplomat named Alice from Scotland and a refugee from a former Greek island named Benno, who get sucked into the action as ramifications from the events of the prior three books come to a head.
There’s a lot of material there for a TV project, and Alfredson described the series as “a unique blend of classic spy novel and mind bending science fiction,” set in a chaotic world that doesn’t look too different from ours. Deadline describes the adaptation as a major television series, and given that Alfredson and Straughan worked on the spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (an adaptation of John le Carré’s novel), this seems like it’ll be right up their alley.
There isn’t an outlet for this project just yet, nor a cast or release date.