Escape: The love story from whirlwind - James Clavell (First edition)

When the Shah is thrown out of Iran the nation’s fanatical turmoil becomes world headlines as party apparatchiks, feudal khans, Tehran bazaars and militant mullahs vie to fill the power vacuum, with the CIA, KGB and MI6 hovering in mutually destructive combat behind them.

Among the western victims of the revolution are the foreign helicopter pilots who have been servicing the oilfields up and down the country. Their one objective now is to make a bold concerted escape, with their helicopters, to safety across the Gulf.

James Clavell told the full story of the three weeks it took them to achieve this in his 1986 bestseller, Whirlwind. In Escape he has taken out just one poignant thread from that epic narrative. The result is the moving and tender love story of Erikki, the blond Finnish pilot, and his beautiful high-born Iranian wife, Azadeh whom he loves beyond safety and beyond politics in a shifting world of greed, ambition, duplicity, heartbreak and violent death.