Read By: Simon Prebble

This supernatural suspense thriller crosses several genres--espionage,
geopolitics, religion, fantasy. But like the chicken crossing the road,
it takes quite a while to get to the other side. En route, Tim Powers
covers a lot of territory: Turkey, Armenia, the Saudi Arabian desert,
Beirut, London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. Andrew Hale, an Oxford
lecturer who first entered Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service as
an 18-year-old schoolboy, is called back to finish a job that culminated
in a deadly mission on Mount Ararat after the end of World War II. Now
it's 1963, and cold war politics are behind the decision to activate Hale
for another attempt to complete Operation Declare and bring down the
Communist government before Moscow can harness the powerful, other-worldly
forces concentrated on the summit of the mountain, supposed site of the
landing of Noah's ark. James Theodora is the uber-spymaster whose
internecine rivalry with other branches of the Secret Intelligence Service
traps Hale between a rock and a hard place, literally and figuratively.
There's plenty of mountain and desert survival stuff here, a plethora of
geopolitical and theological history, and a big serving of A Thousand and
One Nights, which is Hale's guide to the meteorites, drogue stones, and
amonon plant, which figure in this complicated tale. There's a love story,
too, and a bizarre twist on the Kim Philby legend that posits both Philby
and Hale as the only humans who can tame the powers of the djinns who
populate Mount Ararat.

Download File Size:591.21 MB

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