Pékin, printemps 1933. Un lourd silence règne sur la Cité interdite, demeure séculaire des empereurs chinois. Les troupes d'invasion japonaises sont aux portes de la ville. La guerre est là.
Malgré l'angoisse, une urgence absolue affole les conservateurs des collections d'art impériales : comment mettre à l'abri les magnifiques trésors dont ils ont la charge ? Une seule réponse semble possible, en ordonner l'évacuation.
Commence alors une course effrénée de seize années au cours desquelles les trésors impériaux seront transportés sur des milliers de kilomètres à travers la Chine, fuyant la terreur japonaise puis la menace communiste. Près d'un million d'oeuvres et d'objets d'art franchissent ainsi rivières, forêts et montagnes, s'échappant des villes en feu et du chaos de la guerre.
Voici l'histoire d'un petit groupe d'hommes et de femmes admirables qui ont choisi de résister aux assauts de la barbarie. Une remarquable leçon de courage qui nous rappelle la prééminence absolue de la beauté dans un monde en proie aux pires violences.
À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR
D'origine canadienne, Adam Brookes (1963) étudie le chinois à la School of Oriental and African Studies de Londres, avant de devenir journaliste, producteur radio à la BBC, puis correspondant
à l'étranger, basé successivement en Indonésie, en Chine et aux États-Unis, où il vit désormais. Au cours de son parcours, il a réalisé des reportages dans une trentaine de pays, dont l'Irak, l'Afghanistan, la Corée du Nord et la Mongolie.
'Authentic, taut and compelling. Brookes is the real deal'
Charles Cumming
The stunning third novel from multi-award-nominated author Adam Brookes is paranoid, tense and spy fiction at its very finest.
Meet Pearl Tao: an American girl with a lethal secret.
Pearl longed for the life of a normal American teenager: summers at the pool, friends, backyard barbecues in the Washington DC suburbs. But she was different.
Pearl had a gift for mathematics, a college sponsorship from a secretive technology corporation, and a family riven with anger and dysfunction. And it's only now, at nineteen years old, that she has started to understand what role she is to play. What her parents intend for her.
For Pearl Tao, any hope of escape lies with two British spies: Trish Patterson, sidelined in disgrace, and Philip Mangan, blown and discredited - and following his own trail of corruption. Finding out the truth about Pearl will be the most urgent, the most dangerous mission they'll ever undertake.
'The final instalment of Brookes' Mangan trilogy secures its status as a classic'
Telegraph (50 Best Books of 2017)
'Riveting and accomplished'
Sunday Times
Tell them, the Night Heron is hunting . . .
A lone man 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 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.
'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.
