Suzanne Joinson's A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar is a bewitching novel about the vertiginous chasm between East and West. Joinson's richly imagined characters and winding, unexpected plot turns offer a clear-eyed appreciation of how everyone bristles at proscribed geographical identities and not even the most open society can make a lost person feel at home.
In 1923, a trio of missionaries--Eva; her sister, Lizzie; and Lizzie's mentor, Millicent--arrive full of bluster and zeal in Kashgar, an ancient, mostly Muslim trading hub on the Chinese frontier, and are almost immediately imperiled after a cultural misunderstanding. What began as an adventure for Eva, who set out to write the titular guide while keeping an eye on Lizzie, becomes a desperate trek for survival across hostile terrain. In present-day London, a researcher named Frieda has just arrived home from Egypt to find Tayeb, a Yemeni immigrant, camped in her hallway--and the news that she's inherited the contents of an apartment left behind by a deceased woman she's never heard of.
Joinson tells the two stories concurrently, gradually illuminating the connections. It makes for an unusual, sprawling, but beguiling novel, filled with images of desert pilgrimages, pet owls, body painting as erotic expression and communards in a leafy English country town choosing to cut their tongues in order to find meaning in silence. These intriguing characters all think they know what they need from the other culture but, ultimately, are left unprepared for the blinding obscurity of the desert wind. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic