Keynote
A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature
Book Title
The Silk Road
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- “[Kathryn Davis’s] writing exists outside of genre and trends and time. . . . For those willing to get lost in its spiritual haze, there is a uniquely un-2019 pleasure to be found: a meditative bewilderment that just might cede to enlightenment.”—The New York Times Book Review
Body
The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling.
The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.
Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.
List Price
$24.00
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About the Author
Credit: Anne Davis
Praise
- “[Davis is] the most original novelist in America. . . . The Silk Road is . . . a feat of flashing enchantment. I read it in a state I can only describe as baffled wonder.”—Slate
- “Radiant and endlessly shifting, sensitive to outer form and inner reality, wildly and beautifully impenetrable: that’s as good a paraphrase of this splendid, poetic novel of ideas as you’ll get.”—The Boston Globe
- “With nothing less than the human condition on its mind, The Silk Road works in archetype and allegory to produce a slim (not even 150 pages!) but resounding book unlike any you’ve ever read.”—Entertainment Weekly
- “Davis draws inspiration from poet and philosopher Lucretius, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Olaus Magnus, who is known for the sea monsters in his Renaissance maps—but the magic in this mysterious, meditative and questing novel is all her own.”—BBC Culture
