Sam Meekings

The Afterlives of Doctor Gachet tells the story of Paul Ferdinand Gachet, the subject of one of Vincent van Gogh s most famous portraits: one that shows what the artist called the heartbroken expression of our times . But what caused such heartbreak? What is the real story of that mournful man in the painting? This thrilling historical novel follows the life of Doctor Gachet from asylums to art galleries, from the bloody siege of Paris to heartbreak at home, from the fashionable salons of the city to his final retirement in the countryside in Auvers where he became van Gogh’s doctor for the last few weeks of the artist’s life. It also follows his afterlife in the mysterious portrait that van Gogh made of him, from the bunkers of Nazi Germany to becoming the most expensive painting ever sold, from being smuggled to America in a suitcase to being bought by a reclusive billionaire in Tokyo, until the painting finally disappeared at the end of the last century. The novel explores where sadness grows from, and travels across decades and continents to uncover the secrets behind that famous grief-stricken smile.

The Book of Crows is a gripping novel that takes the reader on a thrilling journey through Chinese history. A young girl is kidnapped and taken through the desert to an isolated mountain brothel, where she overhears visitors from the east talking about a mysterious book. Two thousand years later, after a suspicious landslide near Lanzhou, a low-level bureaucrat searches for a missing colleague and begins to uncover worrying secrets. A thirteenth-century Franciscan monk, traversing the Silk Road, begins his extraordinary deathbed confession, about spies and intrigue in the court of the great Kublai Khan. Meanwhile, five hundred years earlier, a grieving Chinese poet is summoned to the Emperor’s palace to face his greatest challenge yet. In a series of delicately interlaced stories, Sam Meekings’ second novel follows the journeys of characters across the Silk Road, where ideas and beliefs have travelled between China and Europe for thousands of years. Their lives, separated by millennia, are all in some way touched by the legendary Book of Crows: a mythical book in which the entire history of the world – past, present and future – is written down.

Under Fishbone Clouds is a universal love story, a family saga, and a journey through Chinese history, myth, and culture.  Following a young Chinese couple as their love grows, and is tested, during Mao's Cultural Revolution, this elegant debut novel provides a rare and personal glimpse into the birth modern China. When the Kitchen God is challenged by the Jade Emperor to fathom the workings of the human heart, he chooses to follow the life of Jinyi and his wife Yuying, from their blossoming love until their old age, in hope of finding an answer. The Kitchen God watches as the new government strictures split their family in two, living inside their hearts as they live through war, separation, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the start of a new era. They endure the loss of those closest to them, homesickness, and isolation, all while keeping alive a love that survives famine, forced labor, and even death itself. Weaving together the story of their life with China’s recent political history, as well as traditional folktales and myths, the Kitchen God illuminates the most impenetrable aspects the human condition.

The Bestiary is an astonishing debut collection of lyrical, intelligent poems which challenge the ways in which we respond to the natural environment around us. With subjects that range from sea-bound eels, lost hedgehogs and lonely butchers to a 17th-century autopsy, Chinese mythology and the flight patterns of snow geese, Sam Meekings' poems explore both the instability and the small moments of epiphany in our complex and changing world.