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The Book of Crows

by Sam Meekings

ISBN: 9781846972140
Imprint: Polygon
Publication Date: Feb 2012
Format: Paperback (eBook also available)
Price: £9.99
Stock Status: in stock

eBook also available at the iBookstore
 

'Meekings’s prose is exemplary, showing a desire not just to honour Chinese culture, but to contribute to it'  - The Herald

'Sam Meekings writes well. The language flows beautifully'  - Book Bag

'The obvious comparison here is David Mitchell and if Meekings doesn't always quite match his ventriloquism, he certainly gives each story a distinctive style and knows how to intrigue' - Jonathan Ruppin’s Top 10 Books of 2011, Foyles

A young girl is kidnapped and taken through the desert to an isolated mountain brothel. Two thousand years later, after a suspicious landslide near Lanzhou, a low-level bureaucrat searches for a missing colleague. A thirteenth-century Franciscan monk, traversing the Silk Road, begins his extraordinary deathbed confession, while five hundred years earlier, a grieving Chinese poet is summoned to the Emperor’s palace. In a series of delicately interlaced stories, Sam Meekings’ richly poetic and gripping second novel follows the journeys of characters whose lives, separated by millennia, are all in some way touched by the mysterious Book of Crows – a mythical book in which the entire history of the world – past, present and future – is written down.

Sam Meekings has garnered international acclaim for his debut novel, Under Fishbone Clouds, also set in China. Born in Margate, Sam grew up in Walberton, not far from Chichester and took an undergraduate degree in Modern History and English Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford University. It was at the end of his Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Edinburgh University, in 2005, that he moved to China to teach English. He now spends most of the year there, with this wife and family, working as a teacher and editor. In 2006 and 2007 Sam was longlisted for the Eric Gregory Award for poets under 30. His debut collection of poetry, The Bestiary, is also published by Polygon.

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