Adam Brookes Books

This gripping true story follows the courageous curators who protected China's finest art during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. In the spring of 1933, the Forbidden City in Peking is filled with tension as Japanese forces approach. The curators face a daunting challenge: how to safeguard the vast imperial art collections they oversee, which include a million pieces that embody China's rich history. Among these treasures are irreplaceable artifacts, such as exquisite silk paintings, rare Ming porcelain, and the culturally significant Stone Drums of Qin, inscribed with 2,500-year-old messages. Under the leadership of museum director Ma Heng, the curators embark on a perilous journey, transporting the collections thousands of miles across China. They navigate treacherous rivers, rugged mountains, and war-torn cities, all while confronting the violence, chaos, and starvation of China's Second World War. This remarkable tale, now told in English for the first time, showcases the determination of a small group of individuals who chose to resist the destruction of civilization in the face of war.

'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.