Adam Brookes Boeken

"The gripping true story of the intrepid curators who saved China's finest art from the ravages of the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. Spring 1933. The silent courtyards and palaces of Peking's Forbidden City are tense with fear and expectation. Japan's aircraft drone overhead; its troops and tanks are only hours away. All-out war between China and Japan is coming, and the curators of the Forbidden City are faced with an impossible question- how will they protect the vast imperial art collections in their charge? The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art - objects that carry China's deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts- exquisite paintings on silk, vanishingly rare Ming porcelain and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of crucial cultural significance. For sixteen terrifying years, under the quiet leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators would go on to transport the imperial art collections thousands of miles across China - up rivers of white water, across mountain ranges and through burning cities. In their search for safety the curators and their fragile, invaluable cargo journeyed through the maelstrom of violence, chaos and starvation that was China's Second World War. Told for the first time in English and playing out across a vast historical canvas, this is the exhilarating story of a small group of men and women who, when faced with war's onslaught on civilisation, chose to resist"--Publisher's description

'Authentic, taut and compelling. Brookes is the real deal' Charles Cumming Fearing for his life, journalist Philip Mangan has gone into hiding from the Chinese agents who have identified him as a British spy. His reputation and life are in tatters. But when he is caught in a terrorist attack in East Africa and a shadowy Chinese figure approaches him in the dead of night with information on the origins of the atrocity, Mangan is suddenly back in the eye of the storm. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away on a humid Hong Kong night, a key MI6 source is murdered minutes after meeting spy Trish Patterson. From Washington, D.C. to the hallowed halls of Oxford University and dusty African streets, a sinister power is stirring that will use Mangan and Patterson as its pawns - if they survive. Deeply steeped in tension and paranoia, Spy Games is Adam Brookes' follow-up to his award-nominated debut Night Heron and a remarkable, groundbreaking spy thriller.

'Authentic, taut and compelling. Brookes is the real deal' Charles Cumming In many ways, Pearl Tao was a typical American child. She spent summer days at the pool, played softball and lingered at suburban barbecues in her home city of Washington DC. Yet she is also an academic prodigy, with a university place sponsored by a secretive advanced technology corporation. Only now, aged nineteen, has she begun to understand the terrifying truth of what her role is to be. What her parents intend her to become. Pearl's only hope of escape lies with two British spies: one, Trish Patterson, sidelined in disgrace; the other, former journalist Philip Mangan, gone rogue and following a trail of corruption. Helping Pearl might be the most important and dangerous thing either will ever do. The stunning third novel from multi-award-nominated author Adam Brookes is paranoid, tense and spy fiction at its very finest.

A lone man, Peanut, escapes a labour camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China. Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British; now Peanut must disappear on Beijing's surveillance-blanketed streets. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via crusading journalist Philip Mangan, offering military secrets in return for extraction. But the secrets prove more valuable than Peanut or Mangan could ever have known ... and not only to the British.