Thomas Legendre looks every inch a well-heeled son of Edinburgh. Cocooned in a warm sweater, his demeanour is as douce as the grey sandstone buildings. But when he opens his mouth he unleashes a New England accent with a startled undertone.

The accent is easy to explain: Legendre was born in Maine, 37 years ago, although he has since spent a good chunk of the intervening time in Arizona. The constant astonishment is hardly surprising, given that since leaving America three years ago, he has produced both his first novel and his first baby.

The Burning — a quintessential American tale — was rejected by several US agents before finding a British champion, who promptly found a publisher. It is released next month and there is already a huge buzz of anticipation. One early reviewer praised its combination of “dazzling prose and real intellectual depth”.

Legendre wrote all 400 pages of his novel without a clue who might publish it. Halfway through, he packed up his manuscript and moved to Edinburgh, where his wife, Allyson Stack, also a writer, had signed up for a PhD.

When not writing hiking scenes, or describing the casino where his heroine plays the slots, he was writing text books, brochures — anything that turned a shilling. Stack, “my first and best reader”, kept him going with constructive criticism and moral support.

Legendre had never been to Scotland before. He was willing to give it a year; before six months were up they had made friends, refocused their eyes to the discreet charms of the New Town and had decided to stay. Meeting him in a club at the heart of the city, a copy of the Scotsman at his elbow, he seems to the manner born.

He was not always so comfortable in these surroundings. By the time The Burning was finished, the family’s savings were running out and there was baby Nicole to consider. Legendre sent his work to an agent in America. She returned it, saying that, although she loved the book, she didn’t think she could sell it.

“She said the plot and pacing were something you might see in genre fiction,” he says. “It was too strongly plotted for literary fiction.” This message was repeated by several American agents.

It was Stack who suggested her husband look closer to home. She was right. Within weeks, Little Brown had snapped up the world English-language rights, which means it can sell it on anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Despite Legendre’s Edinburgh understatement, he can’t quite hide the glee in his voice when he says that Little Brown America is publishing The Burning later in the summer.

Since he completed his debut Legendre has already found time to start both his second novel and baby number two, due in August.

“It is certainly,” he says with some of his adopted city’s famous understatement, “a lot more exciting than our life in Prescott, Arizona.”

The Burning is a hefty read, a campus novel with extra astrophysics, green polemics and knee- grazing sex. If Iain Banks had swapped science fiction for hiking and sustainable development, he might have written something very similar.

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