Sam Meekings 
The Book of Crows 

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 thirteenthcentury 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.

About the author

Sam Meekings grew up near the south coast of England. He took an undergraduate degree in Modern History and English Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford University, and, later, a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Edinburgh University. Since 2005 he has lived and travelled throughout China, working as a teacher and editor. In 2006 and 2007 he was longlisted for the Eric Gregory Award for poets under 30.