AustLit

'Las Vegas, Nevada. Young Australian computer programmer Daniel Carter has arrived at the heart of the American war machine - the drone program at Creech Air Force Base, Indian Springs.

'Naive, untested, but keen to make a difference, he is plunged headlong into America's surreal battle against its enemies in the Middle East - a battle fought at a distance of 7,000 miles from a city where nothing is real.

'As geographic and political boundaries blur, Daniel enters into an unlikely romance with a professional poker player, Ania. But when the hunt for an Al Qaeda master-mind ramps up in the skies over Peshawar, and American pilots begin to die in the suburbs of Las Vegas, events take a devastating turn.

'A novel of a new kind of war, of love and connection in the modern age, Midnight Empire is a powerful thriller that takes us to the troubling epicentre of a foreshortening world. It is a taut and at times terrifying vision of a world without frontiers, a novel about dangerous new realities and how they threaten to transform us.' (From the publisher's website.)