It is 1923 & Evangeline English keen lady cyclist arrives with her sister Lizzie at the ancient Silk Route city of Kashgar to help establish a Christian mission. Lizzie is in thrall to their forceful & unyielding leader Millicent but Evas motivations for leaving her bourgeois life back at home are less clear-cut. As they attempt to navigate their new home & are met with resistance & calamity Eva commences work on her book A Lady Cyclists Guide to Kashgar... In present-day London another story is beginning. Frieda a young woman adrift in her own life opens her front door one night to find a man sleeping on the landing. In the morning he is gone leaving on the wall an exquisite drawing of a long-tailed bird & a line of Arabic script. Tayeb who has fled to England from Yemen has arrived on Friedas doorstep just as she learns that she is the next-of-kin to a dead woman she has never heard of: a woman whose abandoned flat contains many surprises
- among them an ill-tempered owl. The two wanderers begin an unlikely friendship as their worlds collide & they embark on a journey that is as great & as unexpected as Evas. A stunning debut peopled by unforgettable characters A Lady Cyclists Guide to Kashgar is an extraordinary story of inheritance & the search for belonging in a fractured & globalised world.