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.