Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, his dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott’s lover—and Bill’s.

An extraordinary novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.