Tense, atmospheric and tightly plotted, The Man Inside follows the adventures, romantic and otherwise, of idealistic British diplomat Harry Armitage as he rises through the ranks of the Foreign Office—from the last days of Margaret Thatcher to the fall of the Twin Towers.

The love of three women alternatively bedevil and illuminate his existence: Beautiful Lady Jemima Stainsbury, an elusive aristocrat met during college years at Cambridge; California Jones an earnest and dedicated African-American surgeon working for Medecins Sans Frontier in famine-plagued South Sudan; and Zahra Sherzai, the wild daughter of a Pashtun chief. All come together amidst the pounded ruins of Kabul during the war in Afghanistan, where Armitage is sent to negotiate for the release of a British Royal being held hostage by a rogue warlord in a remote village in the Hindu Kush.

Evocatively written, leavened with humor and unforgettable characters, The Man Inside recalls Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh at their best. Scott Seward Smith is the author of Red Line Blues—a prescient and highly praised

“political romance”—the only works of fiction published by Adam Bellow’s Liberty Island Press. For the last thirty years, he’s been a diplomat, a director of NGOs and a United Nations representative in far-flung corners of the world, ranging from the Andaman Islands, to New Guinea, to Afghanistan. He divides his time between New York, Kabul and Cancun, where he lives with his wife overlooking the beach.