MIDNIGHT EMPIRE

A tight, tense, heartstopping novel of modern warfare, where the stakes are high and the price is life in the tradition of le Carre's Absolute Friends.

Las Vegas, Nevada. Young Australian computer programmer Daniel Carter has arrived at the heart of the American war machine - the drone program at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs. Naive, untested, but keen to make a difference, he is plunged headlong into America's surreal battle against its enemies in the Middle East - a battle fought at a distance of 7,000 miles from a city where nothing is real. As geographic and political boundaries blur, Daniel enters into an unlikely romance with a professional poker player, Ania. But when the hunt for an Al Qaeda master-mind ramps up in the skies over Peshawar, and American pilots begin to die in the suburbs of Las Vegas, events take a devastating turn. A novel of a new kind of war, of love and connection in the modern age, Midnight Empire is a powerful thriller that takes us to the troubling epicentre of a foreshortening world. It is a taut and at times terrifying vision of a world without frontiers, a novel about dangerous new realities and how they threaten to transform us. Andrew Croome is a writer living in Canberra. His first work of fiction was Document Z, a Cold War historical novel. It won the 2008 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and the UTS Award for New Writing at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. In 2010 he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year. His articles and reviews have appeared in various publications, including The Age and The Australian. After a research trip to Las Vegas, his second novel, Midnight Empire, was completed in Laos. Andrew holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne which examined the relationship between fiction and history. Raised in Hobart and Albury-Wodonga, he has worked as a computer programmer and writing teacher. In lean times, he has also supported his writing by playing poker.