Journalist turns China experience into thriller

Adam Brookes reported for the BBC from China, Indonesia and the United States for many years, and drew on his life as a foreign correspondent for Night Heron, his first novel. The China-set thriller offers a nuanced look at the "surveillance state" inspired by his own encounters on the mainland. He talks to .

When I started writing Night Heron, I just knew this was one of the few things I was going to see through. I am by nature quite a bone-idle person. I have to push myself quite hard to be driven.

When I first started, I was working full time in Washington. I was finding odd scraps of time to get this thing done - on a plane or a train. Then when the manuscript started getting interest from agents, I took three months' leave to get the second half of the book done. Suddenly I was on my own, having been in this incredibly collegiate environment. Days went by when I didn't have an adult conversation. It felt very different. I found myself able to drift off into a different psychological state of being.

I had this weird experience just before I left Beijing as the BBC's correspondent. This guy came to the bureau on a quiet Sunday afternoon [and] pulled out two secret documents. They were at a low level of classification in the Chinese system, which basically means "internal". Foreigners certainly should not have been reading them.