Tom McCarthy's New Novel Sets a Spy Story Inside Europe's Top Court
Tom McCarthy's New Novel Sets a Spy Story Inside Europe's Top Court
Tom McCarthy's new novel, The Rhyl Poster, is a spy story set inside the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU's highest court, in Luxembourg. The Guardian published its review of the book today, 2 November 2026.
The central character is Stanton, a jurist, meaning a legal expert. He is drafting an opinion, a written piece of legal advice that helps judges reach a decision, on a privacy lawsuit against a data analytics firm. Those are companies that sort and make sense of large amounts of personal information.
Stanton has a past in uniform. He was a former military geographer with the British army in Iraq, and the Guardian's review describes him that way. The publisher, New York Review Books, calls him a brilliant legal theorist working behind the scenes at the court.
The publisher also describes the book as a "legal thriller", a thriller built around a court case. The Brooklyn Rail goes a step further and calls it a kind of anti-thriller, a novel that plays against the genre's usual expectations. Both descriptions point to the same idea: the drama here is in arguments, documents and the people who write them.
McCarthy has a track record of unusual books. His 2005 novel Remainder follows an amnesiac who spends a windfall of money re-enacting his past. British publishers turned it down, and it later appeared as a limited edition from a Paris art collective. A limited edition is a small print run, often sold to collectors.
His later novels found a wider audience. C (2010) and Satin Island (2015) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Britain's best-known fiction award. The Making of Incarnation (2021) is an espionage story about motion capture, the technique of recording real movement to animate digital characters.
McCarthy has lived in Berlin for many years. He holds a Swedish passport, which he obtained after Brexit, the UK's exit from the European Union.
Reviews of The Rhyl Poster have appeared in several places. The Los Angeles Review of Books published an article on the novel on 4 October 2026, and The New York Times ran a review in October. The Guardian's headline frames its verdict as a question, and readers can judge the answer for themselves.
For readers, the book is a useful test of how far a thriller can stretch. Its plot turns on legal reasoning rather than chases, and its hero's real work happens in a drafting room, not a field. Copies are available from the publisher and from bookshops, and libraries should be able to order them through the usual channels.
