Sam Meekings
Sam's remarkable debut novel was 'Under Fishbone Clouds' (Polygon). This tells the story of the lifelong love between the peasant boy Hou Jinyi and the rich city girl Bian Yuying. It begins in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation, and follows their struggle for survival through the subsequent civil war, the 1949 revolution, the Great Leap Forwards and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which bring separation, ruin and death.
His second novel The Book of Crows was published by Polygon in 2011.
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 whoe lives, separated by millenia, 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.