Book description
It is 1923 and Evangeline English, keen lady cyclist, arrives with her
sister Lizzie at the ancient Silk Route city of Kashgar to help
establish a Christian mission. Lizzie is in thrall to their forceful and
unyielding leader Millicent, but Eva's motivations for leaving her
bourgeois life back at home are less clear-cut. As they attempt to
navigate their new home and are met with resistance and calamity, Eva
commences work on her book,
A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar
...
In present-day London another story is beginning. Frieda, a young woman
adrift in her own life, opens her front door one night to find a man
sleeping on the landing. In the morning he is gone, leaving on the wall
an exquisite drawing of a long-tailed bird and a line of Arabic script.
Tayeb, who has fled to England from Yemen, has arrived on Frieda's
doorstep just as she learns that she is the next-of-kin to a dead woman
she has never heard of: a woman whose abandoned flat contains many
surprises - among them an ill-tempered owl.
The two wanderers begin an unlikely friendship as their worlds collide,
and they embark on a journey that is as great, and as unexpected, as Eva's.
A stunning debut peopled by unforgettable characters, A Lady
Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar
is an extraordinary story of inheritance and the search for belonging in
a fractured and globalised world. Joinson s debut switches
effectively between the exoticism ... and the bleakness ... Her prose is
clear and her tale not without humour, although the historical narrative
would have sufficed on its own Suzanne Joinson works in the literature
department of the British Council, and regularly travels widely across
the Middle East, North Africa, China and Europe. In 2007 she won the New
Writing Ventures Award for Creative Non-Fiction for Laila Ahmed . She
is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of
London, and lives by the sea on the South Coast of England.
www. suzannejoinson. com
@suzyjoinson
