Declare

World Fantasy Award 2001. Nebula Award nominee 2001, Mythopoeic Fantasy Award nominee 2002, Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee 2011.

When university professor Andrew Hale receives a message in an old war-time code, he must drop the normal life he's been building for fourteen years, flee undercover to Whitehall in London, and re-start his terminated career as an agent in the most covert section of Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The year is 1963, and various elements from Hale's renounced past are assembling in Beirut – Kim Philby, the one-time British counter-espionage chief, who has turned out to have been a Soviet mole all his life; and the beautiful Elena Ceniza-Bendiga, variously a Comintern soldier in the Spanish Civil War, an agent of the French Deuxieme Bureau, and now perhaps a solo operator bent on revenge; and their plans are centered around an imminent covert Soviet expedition back to the Ark on Mount Ararat, where they all nearly killed each other fourteen years ago.

From the corridors of Whitehall to Bedouin camps in the Arabian Desert, from post-war Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale's story involves T. E. Lawrence, the Dead Sea Scrolls, supernatural entities from the Thousand and One Nights, high international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft – and leads inexorably to a deadly confrontation between Hale and Kim Philby on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.

"A brilliant, strange crossbreed of the spy thriller and the supernatural." – China Miéville