Noah’s Art has a suitably eclectic  range of inspirational sources. Among others are a book on the history of Sufism that I read as a neo-hippy teenager on a visit to Casablanca; the story of a mystic that a friend of mine met in a Kabul market place in the 1970s; the great Cold War spy stories of le Carre and Len Deighton; and real life thriller characters I have personally come across in the course of my work.

These include an English university lecturer exposed as a sleeper agent for the East German Stasi; radical Muslims of a good and bad persuasion, including the work-party of Indonesians (good persuasion) I joined to help reconstruct Banda Ache months after the 2005 Tsunami; the lecturer at a Malaysian University who was implicated in the 2002 Bali bombings and who, as far as I know, is still on the run; the Chinese intelligence agent who gave me a Uighur dagger from a trip he made to the separatist hotbed of Xinjiang; and private dinners I have occasionally been invited to with British cabinet ministers in a little building tucked away behind Westminster Abbey.  It will also be clear to all that I find amazingly mind-blowing the ancient myth-history and escatological literature preserved in the Bible, Koran and other sources.

The Noah Brotherhood trilogy comprises three books, each taking its name from one of the three shadowy figures behind the Jeckyll-and-Hyde Brotherhood of Sufi mystics, themselves named after three of Islam’s prophets:

Book 1: Noah’s Art

Book 2: Adam’s Eve

Book 3: Isa’s Return