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Due Preparations for the Plague

Lowell tries not to think about the past, about the hijacking that killed his mother.

Samantha, on the other hand, cannot let the past go. As a child she survived the hijacking of Air France 064, and as an adult she obsessively digs for answers. Specifically, she wants to find a shadowy figure called Salamander, a man she believes was a key player in the unravelling of the tragedy.

It is the death of Lowell's father, and his legacy of a blue sports bag crammed with documents and videotapes, that finally brings Lowell and Samantha together and reveals the interconnections between victims and perpetrators, saved and damned.

But in this murky world of endless ailiases and surveillance, who can be trusted? When does the quest for truth become a dangerous obsession? And what difference can the truth make?

EXCERPT (AMAZON)

Winner of the 2003 Queensland Premier's Award for the Best Fiction Book.

Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

"Janette Turner Hospital either has a remarkable knack for timing or she keeps her ear so close to the ground she reads the seismic tremors of world events through her fiction before they have finished their full course... this novel is essentially a literary political thriller with no shortage of the paranoiac conspiracy theorising that underlies not only American social thinking these days but its foreign policy as well. It is a densely layered tale of international terrorism, political intrigue and deceit in the model of John Le Carre although perhaps more claustrophobic in its intensity."
  — Sydney Morning Herald

"A race through the inner precincts of terror and espionage, Due Preparations for the Plague is harrowing and intense, but ultimately redemptive. Tom Clancy could learn a thing or two"
  — Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"The Australian Margaret Atwood ... a dark and fatalistic book."
  — The Guardian

FURTHER REVIEWS

INTERVIEW WITH JTH

PURCHASE THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON: Canada | France | UK | US
Australian readers: visit the Harper Collins booksellers page

PUBLICATION HISTORY
Australia Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, 2003
Canada Fourth Estate/ Harper Collins, 2003
UK Fourth Estate/ Harper Collins, 2004
USA W.W. Norton, 2003
IN TRANSLATION
France Dernieres Recommandations Avant La Peste, trans. Virginie Buhl
Paris: Editions Rivages, 2004
Netherlands De Feniks Club, trans. Thijs Voskuilen
Amsterdam: Ambo|Anthos, Literaire Thrillers, 2004
Spain PREPARATIVOS PARA LA PLAGA, trans. Isabel Murillo
Madrid: Alfaguara, 2004

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