Daughters of the Silk Road

Chang'an, 742 CE. Samarkand, 1219. London, 1904.

Three women. Three centuries. One route that was never only about silk.

In Tang Dynasty Chang'an, Lady Wei Ruolan oversees the most successful silk merchant house on the eastern end of the road — and safeguards a secret woven into every bolt her looms produce. In medieval Samarkand, on the eve of the Mongol advance, a cartographer's young apprentice named Dilnoza makes a copy of a map that was not meant to survive. In colonial-era London, a Uzbek scholar named Maryam arrives at the British Museum's archive to recover what was taken — and discovers that the other two women have been waiting for her, in the only way the dead can wait.

*Daughters of the Silk Road* is a braided historical novel about the transmission of knowledge across catastrophe, the violence of archives, and the specific weight of things that women are expected to carry without acknowledgement. It is also, at its heart, a novel about three remarkable people who would have recognised one another instantly across the centuries if only the centuries had allowed it.