Nicholas Jose traces the vanishing of an Australian academic in China. 

Set across Australia and China, the novel moves through diplomacy, translation, surveillance, art, and personal loyalty. It asks what happens when belief — in justice, in cross-cultural understanding, in moral clarity — collides with geopolitical reality.

Jose writes in that distinctly Giramondo register. The publishing house values prose with restraint, that's atmospheric and attentive to intellectual and emotional nuance. It's a classical mystery novel in the vein of Le Carré, but with it's own lane carved right beside it.

It’s contemporary without being topical in a shallow way. It sits in the uneasy space where politics enters private life and doesn’t leave.