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The Trade Mission has been selected as a
Top Ten Best Books of the Year by
The Toronto Star

The Trade Mission is Andrew Pyper’s much-anticipated second novel. It was published in Canada by HarperFlamingo and in the U.K. by Macmillan in 2002, and in the United States by Scribner and elsewhere in early 2003.

The Trade Mission follows Wallace and Bates, two twenty-four year old overnight millionaires on their journey to Brazil -- one that starts in the name of globalized business, and ends in a terrifying struggle for individual survival.

"[The Trade Mission] is a sombre portrait of men and women under the most intense psychological and physical pressure. It packs a mean punch - and some rude surprises...A wonderfully twisted updating of James Dickey's Deliverance, this one will grip you."
- The Guardian (UK)

Read more reviews of The Trade Mission

The novel opens in Sao Paulo, where the two internet entrepreneurs are busy selling their concept for a new website, Hypothesys, a virtual “morality machine” which purports to “help you make the best decisions of your life.” Following this, the two boys and the rest of the Hypothesys team -- Barry (the older American CFO), Lydia (their European counsel) and Crossman (the team’s translator and the novel’s narrator) -- head far up the Rio Negro in the Amazon for an “eco-tour” along with a group of Canadian government bureaucrats. It’s time for a break from all the computer simulations and abstract economics, an opportunity to see something “real” after all the rhetoric of marketing.

Soon, however, things become all too real.

On their third night out the Hypothesys team’s boat is overtaken by unknown assailants who, after viciously killing the boat’s crew, tie rice sacks over the survivors’ heads and take them upstream to a secret jungle camp. There, Wallace, Bates, Lydia, Barry and Crossman are subjected to a series of tortures and physical tests, while in the breaks between these events they attempt to keep each other alive through stories -- about themselves, about imagined futures and pasts -- that they trade in the private darknesses of their hooded faces.

What do the “pirates” that have kidnapped them want from a group of internet developers? Has one of the Hypothesys team betrayed the others for personal gain, or have they only been confused with the government officials on the other boat, and now find themselves embroiled in a political intrigue they know nothing about?

When one of their captors makes a fatal mistake and allows the Hypothesys members to escape, The Trade Mission achieves a unique hybrid of literary effects: a novel that engages themes that are at once contemporary and timeless, a thriller that employs its pacing and complex plotting not only to entertain, but in order to communicate its underlying ideas and perspective of what the “human condition” means in the Virtual Age. In the tradition of Conrad a century ago, and more recently Deliverance and the work of Robert Stone and Ian McEwan, The Trade Mission is a novel of unexpected revelations, psychological suspense and vivid physical adventure. It is a book that combines sharp insights into the consequences of living in a time seemingly without edges, the challenge of maintaining loyalties in situations of extreme threat, and the unlikely shape that courage can take in those you would never think capable of it.

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