The Incarnations:Past Lives Haunt Beijinger

British writer Susan Barker's remarkable new novel is ambitious in scope, scholarly in depth and absolutely riveting.

The Incarnations works on a number of levels, pulling together so many strands of history and perspectives and drawing them into a compelling and convincing tale. Part history, part love story, with good doses of horror, comedy and philosophy, it is ultimately a thriller and a page-turner. In less capable hands, such a daring undertaking could so easily have flopped, but Barker has polished it well and the reader never so much as glimpses the cracks in the magic that is fiction writing.

The book begins with a letter written to middle-aged Beijing taxi driver Wang Jun. The writer claims to be his soul mate and to have known him for many lifetimes. But this is no love letter. As with the ones that follow, there is a chilling undertone to the correspondence: "I pity your poor wife, Driver Wang. What's the bond of matrimony compared to the bond we have shared over a thousands years?"

Wang is rattled. Who is stalking him? What do they want? The identity of the letter writer is kept secret until the closing pages but we are treated to intimate details of the lives the writer claims to have shared with Wang.

 The letters - short stories within the framework of the novel - make for compulsive reading. Each tells of a life the two have shared, dipping into the vast pot of China's history and revealing the details of their lives against a rich historical backdrop. The stories run in chronological order from the time they are young slaves struggling through the Gobi Desert to escape the Mongol invasion, to the Ming dynasty where Wang is a concubine plotting the murder of a sadistic emperor all the way through to their lives as Red Guards during the 1966 Cultural Revolution...

The research Barker has done for the book is phenomenal. She was almost 30, but already with two books under her belt, when she moved to Beijing in 2008 to work on the novel. It took her six years to write and the hard graft is visible in not only the scope of the work but the detail...

If you want to learn more about the book, please go to South China Morning Post.

The Incarnations, by Susan Barker
Doubleday , 384pages