Mao II is about words and images, novelists and terrorists, and is haunted by the intermingled spirits of such diverse figures as Andy Warhol, the master of emptiness, and Mao Zedong, the icon of a world of revolution. The action unfolds around Bill Gray, a reclsuive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been writing for many years, to enter the world of political violence, Semtex explosives and hostages. Stranded by Bill's dangerous passage are his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's - and Bill's - lover. The novel's pages are filled with powerful explosions of dark imagery - the Hilllsborough football disaster, the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini - and it begins and ends with two of the most extraordinary marriage ceremonies in contemporary writing. Mao II is no less than a book-length dispute between literature and political terror, a story that takes us from New York to London, to Athens, to the no-man's-land of Beirut - terror's modern republic.