Why a Booktrail?
1990s, 2000s: A lone man escapes a labour camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China.
Night Heron
What you need to know before your trail
Two decades earlier, a man was a spy for the British. Now he finds Beijing transformed and crawling with danger – the fugitive must quickly disappear on its surveillance-blanketed streets or face death.
Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via journalist Philip Mangan, offering secrets in return for his life.
Mangan is dragged into a deeper and deeper whirlpool of lies, as the secrets prove more valuable than either of them could ever have known… and not only to the British.
Travel Guide
China
The novel opens when we are introduced to prisoner 5995
Bejing
Then the novel lands in Bejing and the centre of the spy operations:
“On one screen, Chareris , coming in on a secure video links from Bejing station. On another, map of east central Being with points plotted in red”
“The streets from Luiliqiao long distance bus station lead east towards the sacred centre of Bejing. On these streets it is coming to see migrants from north West China who have just alighted from their buses”
“Bejing glistened in the early night”
“The theatre of the unobtainable in the Beiing night”
China and Bejing are the hunting grounds here. The escape route and the landscape where nothing is as it seems.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Night Heron
Destination: Beijing (Peking), China Author/Guide: Adam Brookes Departure Time: late 1990s, 2000s
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