Sam Meekings is the author of three novels and a book of poetry.
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? This thrilling historical novel follows Doctor Gachet from asylums to art galleries, from the bloody siege of Paris to life with van Gogh in Auvers, and from the bunkers of Nazi Germany to a reclusive billionaire in Tokyo, to uncover the secrets behind that grief-stricken smile.
Under Fishbone Clouds, published to international acclaim, is a love story and family saga interwoven with traditional folktales and stories from ancient Chinese history. Set against the backdrop of dramatic events of recent Chinese political history, it follows the lives of Jinyi and his wife Yuying. It is based on the lives of the author’s wife’s grandparents.
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. 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’ second novel follows the journeys of characters whose lives, separated by millennia, 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.
The Bestiary is a 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.
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