'A fascinating read: Wilbur Smith meets William Boyd in the warm seas and spice-scented air of Zanzibar' New Statesman
'A riveting thriller' Observer

The year is 1998. Nick, a marine biologist, is working on coral reef protection off the idyllic island of Zanzibar. While on a trip to mainland Tanzania, he meets Miranda, who works in the US embassy there. As romance blooms, the couple could be forgiven for thinking they are living in paradise - until they find themselves embroiled in a desperate terrorist conspiracy.

From the bestselling author of the LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

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His sense of place is unerring, his details exact, felicitous, often rising to the luminosity of poetry - whether he is writing of coral reefs, or clove farms, or the markets of Zanzibar and Pemba. There is no trace of colonial, condescending or Orientalist attitudes in his writing

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A rewarding, intelligent novel that displays his now characteristic blend of experience, imagination and intimate research

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[Foden] is a master of ambiguity where it is welcome, and discomfort where it is not. Above all, he knows how to use individual lives to dramatise and explain external events that impact on us all

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[Foden's] fiction is so convincing that it is hard not to feel that you are reading the "real" inside story. In his hands, terrorists are no longer caricatures of fundamentalist evil, but men whose actions seem understandable, who exist in three dimensions

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Thrills in its astute entangling of East and West

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A splendid adventure

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Foden pulls off a difficult feat - he adds something fresh to the most reported news events of the last half century

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An unusual and refreshing novel; it is willing to engage with important political issues, and does so without oversimplifying them

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Foden's tense, involving, well constructed book presents history as the participants might have seen it