What if your soulmate had been hunting you across a thousand years — and what if that turned out to be the most frightening thing that could ever happen to you?
Wang, a Beijing taxi driver in the anxious months before the 2008 Olympics, begins finding letters tucked into the sun visor of his cab, signed by someone who claims to have loved him through six lifetimes. What follows is not romance but excavation. The letter-writer drags us back through the bloodiest seams of Chinese history — a Tang dynasty courtesan, a boy sold into a Jin invasion, a eunuch scheming in the Ming court, a concubine, a girl swept up in the Opium War, a Red Guard denouncing her own — and in each life the bond between the two souls curdles into something far closer to predation than to devotion. Love, here, is not the thing that saves you. It is the thing that keeps finding you.
Barker writes violence the way other people write weather: constantly, atmospherically, without once flinching. Having come to her straight from Old Soul, I started to see the obsession that organizes her whole body of work — the soul that will not stay dead, the past that arrives to collect on its debts, the terrible intimacy of being known across centuries by something that means you harm. It is brutal and baroque and, just occasionally, too much, and I could not put it down.
A thousand years of Chinese history smuggled into the front seat of a cab. I finished it genuinely stunned that more people don't talk about this book.