To The Last Page

Chinese whispers In some respects, Adam Brookes' Night Heron is a standard and even run-of-the-mill espionage thriller.  The operation here runs along familiar lines, with stock characters and shady agencies. There are however a few points where Night Heron stands out from the crowd. One is that it's set in China, a place of major significance in the world today, and one whose actions and growing power is still largely unknown. Another point in its favour is that this is the debut novel from a former BBC correspondent in China, so it's written with an on-the-ground familiarity with the subject. What is most interesting about this spy thriller however is the nature of the informant. Peanut/Li Huasheng, code-name Night Heron, has helped the British Intelligence before, but it was 20 years ago. In the meantime he's been locked away in a "labour reform faculty" in the Qinghau desert. On escape he attempts to reopen his links with British Intelligence through a j...

Walking through some dark places... When issues related to the working class communities of Glasgow are tackled - in my experience more often in cinema than literature (in Red Road , in the films of Ken Loach and Peter Mullan) - it's to depict sordid situations of drugs, alcohol, poverty, abuse, deprivation and street violence (Mullan's brilliant Neds  being the hardest-hitting of all). Rachel Seiffert's The Walk Home deals with similar ground-level issues, but from a perspective of a community that rarely has a voice in UK literature - the working class loyalist Protestant and Orange communities living in the schemes of greater Glasgow in places like Drumchapel. Rachel Seiffert made her mark with The Dark Room (filmed as Lore ) and The Way Home similarly deals with social upheaval, family troubles and absent parents, but the subject seems closer to home this time and the situation rather more complex. The focus is divided between Graham and Stevie (the connection betwee...