Arriving in a city like Addis Abba, Anna Hendrix likes to seek out a bookshop, if she has the time. She is a language expert, so it makes sense she would also love books. The name on her passport, however, isn’t Anna Hendrix. It is Ellen Fields. This is because Anna is also an American spy, though she doesn’t bother to tell us this right away. 

“I often traveled for work,” Anna concedes wryly, as she follows a man through Ethiopian streets. And so she does—always glancing over her shoulder, always with an eye on the exits—working on the fringes of a decaying empire. For a long time, she was in counterterrorism, but now Anna is on a new mission to locate a mysterious and potentially powerful metal of unknown origin that has friends and enemies alike scrambling across the globe. 

Her pursuit will take her from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia—through expatriate enclaves and the NGO communities in which she cultivates Ellen Fields’ identity while painstakingly extracting information from a wide array of characters: aid workers and informants, energy magnates and dissidents. As the pressure mounts to find samples of the metal, Anna must make choices with life-changing implications not just for herself, but for the people with whom she deals, always bearing in mind the young daughter waiting for her back home. 

In Nothing on Earth, novelist Ian MacKenzie reimagines a pivotal decade in the Pax Americana, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the storming of the Capitol. Anna’s voice—lean, understated and unflappable—is our companion and guide through the dark topography of geopolitical power, and in the end, the furthest reaches of human understanding.