A glimpse of James Bond’s literary makeover is offered today as Penguin unveils the jacket for its official new story about the spy.

A blood-red flower with the sensuous silhouette of a naked Bond girl as its stem has been created for Devil May Care, written by Sebastian Faulks, who took up where Ian Fleming left off four decades ago.

Commissioned by Fleming’s family, the novel – intended to be a classic Bond set in exotic locations, with glamorous women and larger-than-life villains – will be published on May 28 to mark the centenary of the author’s birth. More than half a century after Fleming, who died in 1964, worked on the cover design of his first Bond book, Casino Royale– which he described as having “exquisite symmetry and absolute chastity” – Faulks told The Times that Penguin had produced a jacket for his Bond book that “looked stylish and exciting”.

Faulkes, author of Birdsong, said that he had written 80 per cent of his 007 novel in Fleming’s style. “I didn’t go the final distance for fear of straying into pastiche, but I strictly observed his rules of chapter and sentence construction.”

When Fleming’s estate announced last year that it had commissioned a Bond book, the spy writers John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth were tipped for the job. But Faulks’s Cold War novel On Green Dolphin Street inspired the family to approach him. Like Fleming, Faulks began his writing career as a journalist. When Faulks reread the Bond books he was struck by “the sense of jeopardy Fleming creates about his solitary hero, a certain playfulness in the narrative details, and a crisp, journalistic style that hasn’t dated”.

Devil May Careis likely to appear on the big screen, to judge by the enthusiastic response from Barbara Broccoli, who has produced more than a dozen Bond films. Had someone told her that it was a long-lost Fleming manuscript she would have believed them, she said.

The Bond girl depicted on the jacket is the British model Tuuli Shipster.

The market for Fleming first editions is so strong that Bloomsbury Auctions in London could be about to break the world auction record. On Thursday a first edition of Casino Royale is estimated to fetch £22,000.

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