About the Books
Book 1 - FRACTURE
Book 2 - UNDESIRABLE
Book 3 - RECOGNITION
Book 4 - CONSEQUENCES
Book 5 - EROSION
Book 6 - INERTIA
Prequel - UNION
Prequel - PARTITION
Prequel - CRISIS
*** Click a book cover image to view on Amazon ***
ANTHONY D. BIRCH
Legitimacy is a slow‑burning, nine‑book alternate history series where power is exercised through administration rather than war. Borders shift through memoranda, treaties, and classifications, as institutions quietly decide which nations and identities endure.
The world diverges after a fragile Franco‑British union in 1940 and a partitioned China in 1949, leaving Europe unsettled and open to bureaucratic reinvention. Four nuclear powers — the Greater German Reich, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the Atlantic Federation — maintain an uneasy peace built on the shared understanding that open conflict is no longer survivable. Within that tension, nations disappear not through battles, but through forms, decrees, and signatures.
The series follows sixteen characters living inside this machinery: citizens watching their homelands transform, architects shaping new orders, analysts interpreting shifting legality, and officials navigating institutions where recognition can make or erase entire nations.
Spanning 1940 to 1980, Legitimacy offers a quiet, unsettling portrait of a world where administration becomes the most powerful weapon of all — and where people adapt to an order that changes slowly enough to feel inevitable.
For readers of John le Carré, Hilary Mantel, and serious political fiction.
Book 1 - FRACTURE
Book 2 - UNDESIRABLE
Book 3 - RECOGNITION
Book 4 - CONSEQUENCES
Book 5 - EROSION
Book 6 - INERTIA
Prequel - UNION
Prequel - PARTITION
Prequel - CRISIS
*** Click a book cover image to view on Amazon ***
Map of the World
Map of Europe
Map of Americas
Map of Asia
Anthony D. Birch spends his working life as a consultant specialising in business analysis — untangling stakeholders, making sense of data, and designing process solutions. It turns out spending a career thinking about how things work and how to solve the right problem are excellent preparation for writing a nine-book saga about how the twentieth century might have gone with a few historical tweaks.
Legitimacy began with two questions Anthony couldn't quite let go of: what if Britain and France had unified rather than merely allied, and what if the Reich had never turned east against the Soviet Union? From there, the answer grew into something far larger than intended — six novels and three prequels, built on a world bible, maps, character bios, character portraits and timelines that expanded steadily over months of research and revision.
This was never going to be an action series, and Anthony never wanted it to be. Legitimacy is interested in power exercised through administration — in the memoranda, classifications and quiet signatures that decide which nations, borders and identities survive. Its heroes are clerks, analysts and officials, not soldiers, and its battles are fought in registries.
While the series is fiction, its texture draws on real historical events, and Anthony's own experiences and imagination. He lives in the United Kingdom with his wife, Abi, and their three children, Theo, Toby and Jessica, to whom Legitimacy is dedicated.