Carole Angier

Brush with Immortality

The Ten Thousand Things

By

Duckworth Overlook 354pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

The Ten Thousand Things opens with a bookseller’s advertisement for itself, stating that it was translated from a manuscript rescued during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. And it ends with two ‘imperial notes’, explaining how the manuscript, written in 1385, was preserved by successive emperors of China for hundreds of years but considered too subversive to be read. This classic framing device perfectly encapsulates the extraordinary novel inside – its huge sweep of time, its artful mix of fiction and history, its debate between the conflicting claims of art and power. I’ve never read anything like it.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us