Lie Down with Lions

1981

The men who wanted to kill Ahmet Yilmaz were serious people. They were exiled Turkish students living in Paris, and they had already murdered an attache´ at the Turkish Embassy and firebombed the home of a senior executive of Turkish Airlines. They
 hose Yilmaz as their next target because he was a wealthy supporter of the military dictatorship and because he lived, conveniently, in Paris. Continue reading

I get a lot of letters about the love scene in this book. I suppose it is rather steamy. I worked for a year on a story, called Country Risk, that I never finished. It was about a group of Russians who take over a Western bank and attempt to manipulate a financial crisis. I did a lot of research and came up with a plot which my agent and my publishers liked.

As I began Chapter One, I started thinking about how people talk about Eye of the Needle and how they are on the edge of their seat, desperate to know what happens next. I realised nobody was ever going to feel that way about a what happens in a bank and I abandoned it. Instead, I came up with Lie Down with Lions, a story about two people escaping from Afghanistan over the Himalayas during the Afghan War. And as in Eye of the Needle, I put a woman at the centre of the story.

“Vintage Follett . . . This is his most ambitious novel and it succeeds admirably.” – USA Today

“A deadly romantic triangle, a clandestine mission with global stakes, an exotic location, a plot as gripping and ingenious as Eye of the Needle . . . engineered to perfection with breathless acceleration . . . I couldn’t put it down.” – Los Angeles Times

“Sheer suspense.” – The Washington Post

“Masterful . . . plot and counterplot, treachery, cunning and killing . . . keep you on edge every moment.” – Associated Press

“Combines modern warfare, international espionage, and a love story while also, in typical Follett fashion, playing out the fate of his characters amid thrilling escapes and shattering revelations.” – Richmond Times-Dispatch