The Message

By: Mai Jia

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Paperback | 12 January 2020

At a Glance

Paperback
432 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
3 x 12.9 x 19.7

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Five code-breakers gather in the mountains of China. Which one is a double agent? A World War Two spy thriller from the most translated Chinese novelist of our time.

A dazzling literary thriller set in Japan-occupied China from the most translated Chinese novelist of our time. China, 1941. At the height of the Second World War, Japan rules over China. In Hangzhou, a puppet government propped up by the Japanese wages an underground war against the Communist resistance. Late one night, five intelligence officers, employed as codebreakers by the regime, are escorted to an isolated mansion outside the city. The secret police are certain that one of them is a communist spy. None of them is leaving until the traitor is unmasked. It should be a straightforward case of sifting truth from lies. But as each codebreaker spins a story that proves their innocence, what really happened is called into question again and again.

About the Author

Mai Jia's first novel in English, Decoded, was published by Penguin Classics in 2002, and has been translated into over twenty languages. His novels have sold over 10 million copies and Mai Jia has won the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the highest literary honour in China. The Message was first published in 2007 and has sold over a million copies in China. Mai Jia was born in l964 and spent many years in the Chinese intelligence services.

Industry Reviews

'A spy novel on a grand scale in which nothing is as it seems'
The Times on The Message

'Jia's playful mix of tradecraft, puzzle-solving and human folly brings an original twist to the spy fiction canon'
Sunday Times on The Message

'A page-turner with a gripping plot, other worldy aura, and flamboyant detail' New
York Times on Decoded

'A mix of spy thriller, historical saga and mathematical puzzle that coheres into a powerful whole'
Financial Times on Decoded

'A literary superstar'
Telegraph

'War dramas, with their hackneyed plots and cliched characters, are popular in the mainland. The Message, though, uses the war as cover to refer to the horrors of communist rule, particularly but not exclusively from The Cultural Revolution'
South China Morning Post

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