The Silk Road: A Novel
About this audiobook
A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature
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’ 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.
About the author
Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award (1999) and the Katherine Anne Porter Award (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006. Davis is senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis; she lives in Montpelier, Vermont.
Laura Jennings is a professional narrator and voiceover artist with an MFA in creative writing. Her intrinsic appreciation of the techniques that comprise storytelling allow her to analyze the underlying moods and currents of a book and bring them into her interpretation of it. An avid reader, she enjoys a quiet lifestyle in the Pacific Northwest with her loving husband and aged beagle, Dottie.
