Raised as a Catholic in 1920s by his mother, a former nun, and his “censorious low-church Anglican” grandfather in Cotswold village of Chipping Camden, the epitome of traditional, rural England, Hale couldn’t help being a reclusive child. Not overly bright, not overly handsome or charming, not even exceptionally brave – but instead deeply loyal and driven, with a strong moral compass, an inherent, unbreakable humanness – and more than a passing addiction to the Great Game. One that involves Thousand Nights and One Night, T.E Lawrence, British Secret Service, Mount Ararat and Dead Sea scrolls, as well as baptism in Jordan River, a disgraced nun, an inhabited fox, the vagaries of Heaviside Layer and a colony of djinn.Īndrew Hale, the main protagonist of this novel, is (almost) a typical everyman. He found a nexus of happenstance, coincidence, inexplicable historical facts, and, diligently digging around through archives and his own subconscious, created an improbable, but inherently logical explanation to it all. So, in short, if you want to know why USSR fell in 1991, read Declare ). Thy story is a marvelous one! If it were graven with needles on the corners of the eye, it would serve as a warning to those that can profit by example.Ī Cold War era spy thriller/horror/love story, centered around the life of the infamous Soviet spy Kim Philby, where French, American, British and Soviet secret services are viciously fighting for access to a supernatural power – djinn, or nephilim, or fallen angles, residing in remote wildness of Arabian deserts.

Declare by Tim Powers