‘I can never hope to equal it again’: Geoffrey Archer announces that his next novel will be his last | Jeffrey Archer

Novelist Geoffrey Archer has announced that his next novel, Adam and Eve, will be his last, coming out 50 years after his first was published.

The 85-year-old author has sold more than 300 million books worldwide since publishing his first novel, “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less,” in 1976, according to his publishers. His 1979 novel, Ken and Abel, was his biggest success, selling more than 34 million copies in 119 countries and 47 languages, and being reprinted more than 130 times.

Archer’s 31st and final novel, Adam and Eve, which publisher HarperCollins describes as “a powerful story that weaves together love, betrayal, and the stark realities of a world at war,” will be released in English in October.

“When I came up with the idea for this novel a few years ago, I knew it was larger in scope than anything I had done before and I accepted that the research alone would be more demanding than anything I had undertaken in the past,” Archer said in a statement. “And when I finally sat down to write Adam and Eve, I also realized, by the end of the first draft, that this would be my last novel, because at the age of eighty-five I could never hope to equal it again.”

“I can’t imagine giving up my pen forever,” he added, saying he might continue writing short stories. “But I can’t think of a more fitting way to end my novel-writing career.”

Despite selling hundreds of millions of books, and often being praised as compellingly readable, Archer has failed to win over many critics over the decades. Robert McCrum wrote in 2009: “To open one of his books is to risk being assaulted by a feverish array of clichés, mixed metaphor, implausibility, epithets, and sheer hyperbole sufficient to send most readers screaming in breathless delirium to the mature, lucid, urgent pages of a Barbara Cartland or an Enid Blyton.”

Archer’s career as a novelist was often overshadowed by his colorful, if controversial, public life.

He was elected as a Conservative MP in 1969 at the age of 29, but resigned from Parliament in 1974 when he lost his savings in a fraudulent investment scheme.

In 1986, he resigned as deputy leader of the Conservative Party after the Daily Star reported that he had paid a sex worker for sex. The following year, he successfully sued the newspaper, claiming he had never met the sex worker, but later paid her £2,000 to help her escape press attention. Archer won £500,000 damages in a trial in which the judge praised Archer’s wife’s “perfume” in his instructions to the jury.

Archer won the Conservative nomination for Mayor of London in 1999 but was forced to stand down after reports emerged that he had persuaded a friend to lie to court in a 1987 libel trial. Archer was suspended from the Conservative Party for five years and an investigation for perjury was launched. At the same time he was starring in a production of his own courtroom play The Accused, about the trial of an alleged murderer in which the audience votes on the guilt of Archer’s character each night.

In 2001, Archer was convicted of two counts of perjury and two counts of perverting the course of justice, was sentenced to four years in prison, and was forced to pay damages and costs. While in prison, he wrote three volumes of memoirs, all of which were bestsellers. He was released after serving two years, and spent the next decades focusing on his writing career, which spanned more than 50 solo works, and his extensive charitable work.

Archer remained a member of the House of Lords until his retirement in 2024.