By: Blake Daniels
Brett Andrew Strange’s Across Latitudes trilogy has the pace and international scale of an espionage thriller, but its author believes the series also offers the kind of layered material that can sustain a book-club discussion.
Strange is a former U.S. intelligence officer and the author of Against the Dusk, Beneath the Purple Dawn, and Eastern Light, the three novels that make up the trilogy. He also wrote Encounters: Six Short Stories. His research has taken him to more than two dozen countries, and he has lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He currently calls San Francisco home.
The trilogy tells one continuous story spanning 2017 to 2024. Iraq-war veteran Paul Drake and Russian-born art curator Katerina Volkova are drawn into a world of shadow warfare and political instability that moves from New York City through Istanbul, California, Paris, Malta, and Sicily before reaching the war in Ukraine.
For book clubs, Strange sees the series’ contemporary setting as a major source of discussion.
“There is an urgency to the themes and story,” he said. “Across Latitudes is about what is happening now, not some retrospective to another time, such as yet another fictional book on WWII.”
The trilogy uses modern warfare and intelligence activity as part of its plot, but Strange also places private lives under the same pressure. The characters face romantic commitments, family strain, personal revenge, moral uncertainty, and the consequences of violence.
“There are realities about modern warfare and spycraft, and also rich material in how personal fate and political power collide, especially through Katy’s arc and her relationship to art as a way of understanding truth,” Strange said.
Katerina’s role as an art curator gives readers a character whose connection to conflict is filtered through culture, memory, identity, and questions about what can endure. Strange has cited Mikhail Bulgakov as an important influence and says the trilogy closes with a line from The Master and Margarita.
“The trilogy closes on Bulgakov’s line from The Master and Margarita, that ‘manuscripts don’t burn,’” he said. “That endurance – vita brevis, ars longa, life is short, art is long – is a perspective that is carried as an explicit theme.”
That theme can open discussion about what art means during war, how societies remember conflict, and whether individual expression can survive political repression.
The story’s structure also gives readers multiple perspectives to debate. Strange uses close third-person narration to move inside the minds of protagonists, antagonists, and younger supporting characters.
“Readers keep coming back to the close third-person perspective of the narrative – the way it gets inside the heads of the villains, protagonists, and even children, so you understand the drama from multiple perspectives,” he said.
The supporting cast includes a teenage Syrian refugee and a nine-year-old Ukrainian orphan. Their presence makes the consequences of conflict visible beyond the professional world of spies and soldiers.
Place is another potential discussion point. Strange has traveled to more than two dozen countries in connection with his writing, and the trilogy ranges across several cities and regions.
“And the settings – New York, Paris, Istanbul, Malta, Sicily, the Ukrainian front – are all very interesting places to discover via the scenes,” he said.
The complete trilogy edition includes referential footnotes for readers who want to explore facts behind the fiction. That feature can make the books especially useful for groups interested in discussing where fiction meets history, intelligence practice, and current events.
Strange says he did not want to supply a simple moral verdict on the conflicts surrounding the characters.
“I didn’t want to hand readers a moral verdict; I wanted readers to live the drama themselves and let them draw their own conclusions,” he said.
The trilogy can also lead readers outward into Strange’s broader work. He is the author of Encounters: Six Short Stories and says his next project will return to shorter fiction rooted in contemporary international themes. “I’m still circling a lot of the same questions about human resolve and authentic freedom, but will do this outside the framework of Across Latitudes for the next book,” Strange said. Those recurring questions provide another discussion bridge for readers interested in following his work beyond the trilogy.
That open-ended approach is well suited to group discussion. The series gives book clubs questions about freedom, personal responsibility, power, love, art, survival, and the moral compromises people make when history closes in around them. The espionage plot provides momentum, while the characters and themes give readers reasons to keep talking after the final chapter.
Across Latitudes is available on Amazon.
