Palace of Tears (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781068703829)

London, Cambridge, and Berlin, 1974.

Steve Percival's life is already precarious when a chain of unexpected entanglements pulls him into the shadows of the Cold War. A mother with a past she cannot explain, a brilliant academic seeking to shape her own future, and a young woman with claims on Steve that go beyond affection - each draws him in a different direction.

When Steve follows a cryptic trail to Berlin, he finds himself in a city divided not only by walls but by secrets. What he learns there forces him to confront the stories he has inherited and the ones he has told himself. Returning to Cambridge, he attempts to make sense of it all the only way he knows how: by writing a play. Its rehearsal room becomes a mirror of the world he has left behind - a world of loyalty, betrayal, and the dangerous consolations of truth told slant.

Palace of Tears is a literary Cold War novel where theatre and espionage illuminate one another. It examines the fault-lines between love and leverage, art and manipulation, and the ways our lives are shaped by the choices we barely understand at the time.

The second novel in The Thieves of Time, a sequence exploring art, identity, secrecy, and the lives we become under pressure.