Background
Pickering was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire, the son of Arthur Samuel Pickering and Lorna (née Grocock).
(It is September 2009, Ramadan and the eve of Afghanistan'...)
It is September 2009, Ramadan and the eve of Afghanistan's first 'democratic' elections when young American Malone, pilot for an aid airline, does Fatima Hamza the favour of flying her out of Kabul to Bamiyan, while his surgeon wife Kim heads south to Kandahar. The beguiling, Oxford-educated Pashtun Fatima has left Pakistan to rediscover the country she comes from, she tells him, to retrace the places that were important to her spy-chief father, ex-military man and writer with a disturbing gift of prophecy. For both Kim and Malone, the foray into that dangerous territory is to become a prolonged adventure, their former lives receding as they lose touch with one another and enter the world of the enemy. Each is to witness the horror of an air raid, and each is to come face-to-face with the Taliban. They will glimpse hell, but paradise, too, and be changed.
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Pickering was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire, the son of Arthur Samuel Pickering and Lorna (née Grocock).
He was educated at the Royal Masonic School for Boys in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and at the University of Leicester.
Pickering started his career as a journalist but wrote his first novel, Wild About Harry, after an assignment to Paraguay to find the war criminal Josef Mengele. The novel was both a critical and popular success and was long listed for the Manitoba Booker Prize. Charlie Peace, his next controversial novel about the second coming of Christ in modern times, drew the quote from J. G. Ballard that Pickering was "a truly subversive author" and called the decision not to publish the book in Britain "pure censorship".
The controversy led The Sunday Times to dub him "the de facto Norman Mailer of the British Literati".
After a near fatal stabbing in the Groucho Club in 1997 that blinded him in one eye, Pickering went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the last stages of the civil war, and produced The Leopard"s Wife to favourable reviews. He then went to Afghanistan for his most recent novel Over the Rainbow, which will be published in 2012.
Pickering has written short stories, poems and articles for publications all over the world. His work has been compared to that of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
(It is September 2009, Ramadan and the eve of Afghanistan'...)