War correspondent Colin Frere is on assignment in Malia, a Southeast Asian state
consumed by civil conflict and revolution. He is abducted by the Communist
guerrillas - actually by prearrangement. His mission is to understand the rebels and
their charismatic leader - not least because his own elder brother once fought
alongside them. But he soon finds that idealism trumps journalistic detachment
and he becomes an active soldier in the revolutionary cause. His journey and that
of his adopted country involves heroism, romance, comradeship - and ultimately
betrayal.
Heroes in the Evening Mist was the last novel by the prolific author William Ash,
who died in 2014, and it has hitherto been unpublished. Ash was born in Texas but
fought as a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War before spending three years in a
German prisoner-of-war camp. His repeated attempts to escape made him one
of the models for the character played by Steve McQueen in the film The Great
Escape and were chronicled in his best-selling memoir Under the Wire. He was
a lifelong socialist and his final work shows a rare sympathetic engagement not
only with the cause of post-colonial liberation but also with the problems faced by
revolutionary governments once they have won power