'A sophisticated literary thriller in the vein of Le Carré and William Boyd involving the disappearance of a nuclear scientist in Oxford.
'When John Dyer returns to Oxford from Brazil with his young son, he doesn't expect to find them both in danger. His time living on the edge as a foreign correspondent in Rio is over.
'Yet the rainy streets of this English city turn out to be just as treacherous as those he used to walk in the favelas. Leandro's schoolmates are the children of influential people, among them an international banker, a Russian oligarch, an American CIA operative and a British spook. As they congregate round the sports field for the weekly football matches, the network of alliances and covert interests soon becomes clear to Dyer. But it is a chance conversation with an Iranian nuclear scientist, Rustum Marvar, father of a friend of Leandro, that sets him onto a truly precarious path.
'When Marvar and his son disappear, several sinister factions seem acutely interested in Marvar's groundbreaking research at the Clarendon Lab, and what he might have told Dyer about it - especially as Dyer was the last person to see Marvar alive.' (Publication summary)
'Nicholas Shakespeare has done everything and known everybody in his time. As a boy in Argentina, he read to Jorge Luis Borges; as a literary editor in London in his early 20s, he published reviews by Dirk Bogarde; as a biographer, he wrote a reliable account of that starry bewilderment of a man Bruce Chatwin; as a novelist, his The Dancer Upstairs was turned into a film directed by John Malkovich.' (Introduction)
'Nicholas Shakespeare has done everything and known everybody in his time. As a boy in Argentina, he read to Jorge Luis Borges; as a literary editor in London in his early 20s, he published reviews by Dirk Bogarde; as a biographer, he wrote a reliable account of that starry bewilderment of a man Bruce Chatwin; as a novelist, his The Dancer Upstairs was turned into a film directed by John Malkovich.' (Introduction)
