Ten Thousand Things
In the turbulent final years of the Yuan Dynasty, Wang Meng is a minor bureaucrat in the government of the Mongol conquerors. He is also an extraordinarily gifted artist whose paintings capture the infinite expanse of China's natural beauty. But an empire in turmoil is not a place or time for sitting still. On his journeys across the realm, Wang encounters fellow master painters, a fierce female warrior known as the White Tigress who recruits him as a military strategist, and an unprepossessing young Buddhist monk who rises from beggary to extraordinary heights.
John Spurling's award-winning The Ten Thousand Things seamlessly fuses the epic and the intimate with the precision and depth that the real-life Wang Meng brought to his art.
John Spurling is an award-winning historical novelist and playwright whose plays have been performed on TV, radio and stage, including at the National Theatre. He has reviewed for a range of newspapers, magazines and BBC radio, and was for twelve years the art critic of the New Statesman. He lives in London and is married to the biographer Hilary Spurling. He is the author of several books, including Arcadian Days and Arcadian Nights. For more information, visit: www.johnspurling.com