Book description
A washed up TV reporter stumbles onto a corruption scandal in
Western China. Pursued through the desert by a psychotic spin-doctor
and a world-weary cop, he discovers the real China: illegal metal
mines, a fashion-crazed gang of girl bikers, a whole commune of
Tiananmen Square survivors and the up-market sleaze-joints of
Beijing.
En route, he clashes with a stellar cast of
people-traffickers, prostitutes and TV execs. But then the unquiet
dead begin to intervene: ghosts from his own past and the past of
Chinese Communism; the 'spirits that hover three feet above our heads'
of Chinese folklore.
Rare Earth is a story about love,
journalism, ghosts, metallurgy, vintage militaria and large
motorcycles set in the badlands of Inner Mongolia and Ningxia. It is
about the west's inability to understand the East; one man's epic
journey across a dying landscape, where 'thousands of pairs of eyes
peer beyond grimy windowpanes into the moonless sky, looking for
something better.'
Paul Mason is the award winning economics editor of the BBC
current affairs programme Newsnight and author of Meltdown: The End of
the Age of Greed, an account of the 2008 financial crisis and Why It's
Kicking Off Everywhere : The New Global Revolutions. This is his first novel.
