There are histories beneath history. Tim Powers, one of the most brilliant and audacious talents in contemporary fiction, casts an eerie light on the terrible events that made the twentieth century and reveals what the Cold War was really about.
Declare
After a ten-year hiatus, British academic Andrew Hale is abruptly called back into the Great Game by a terse, cryptic telephone message. Born to "the trade" and recruited at the age of seven by a most secret Secret Service, Hale, in 1963, is forced to confront again the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare.
Two decades earlier, as a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Hale first encountered the incomprehensible rhythms of an invisible world. And from that moment on nothing was ever safe and knowable again. There also, his life became eternally linked with two others' lives that would recurrently intersect his at its most dangerous junctures: his "comrade operative," the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, the object of Hale's undying love, and Kim Philby, the mysterious traitor to the British cause...and perhaps to all humanity. Together they form an unlikely trimuvirate with one shared destiny: Declare.
But the Great Game is greater and far more terrible than Andrew Hale ever imagined. There is another, larger war raging unseen all around him, a cataclysmic secret conflict masked by a "Cold War" of national ideologies. And it is drawing Hale, Elena, and Philby inexorably toward world-shattering consequences on a Biblical mountain in the Middle East...and to a hideous feast of broken minds, destroyed lives, and devoured souls.
The remarkable imagination of Tim Powers has wedded John le Carré with Clive Barker to create something unlike anything previously contained between book covers. A sweeping epic adventure, a love story, a revelation, a nightmare, it is our past and our world as something other...Declare!
"Highly ingenious . . . No one else writes like Powers, and Declare finds him at the top of his game."--San Francisco Chronicle
"There's never been a novel quite like DECLARE...one of the protean Powers's most absorbing and rewarding creations."--Kirkus Starred Review
"Dazzling . . . a tour de force, a brilliant blend of John le Carre spy fiction with the otherworldly."--Dean Koontz
"DECLARE is classic Tim Powers, his best novel since Last Call, and possibly his best to date."--Locus Magazine
"Tim Powers is a brilliant writer. Declare's occult subtext for the deeper Cold War is wonderfully original and brilliantly imagined."--William Gibson
Dazzling . . . a tour de force, a brilliant blend of John le Carre spy fiction with the otherworldly. --Dean Koontz"
There s never been a novel quite like DECLARE one of the protean Powers s most absorbing and rewarding creations. --Kirkus Starred Review"
Highly ingenious . . . No one else writes like Powers, and Declare finds him at the top of his game. --San Francisco Chronicle"
DECLARE is classic Tim Powers, his best novel since Last Call, and possibly his best to date. --Locus Magazine"
Tim Powers is a brilliant writer. Declare s occult subtext for the deeper Cold War is wonderfully original and brilliantly imagined. --William Gibson"
