This is Volume One of a planned trilogy. One morning in Han dynasty China (206 BC - 220 AD), a girl of eleven is waking up... The day Meike grew up started out like most. She woke to the songs of mockingbirds in the camellia tree. She could hear Ahmei, the cook, in the forecourt bang a pot over the stove. She could smell smoke from Ahmei's fire and from a hundred others in their crowded district. If she concentrated, she could smell other things too - earth still damp from last night's rain, peppers soaking in a vat, and something she couldn't quite name riding the breeze that stirred the...

"No art ever came out of not risking your neck," Eudora Welty famously said. "Mobile Hymn" and "Great Divide" are two magnificent, breakneck plays about America's addiction to wide open spaces, the road leading to them, and beyond. "Cassatt and Degas" has Mary Cassatt risking her neck in Paris and in a men's world, "The Bear and his Monkey" follows a mighty, jovial Samuel Johnson and his mercurial sidekick James Boswell on that trip to Scotland that changed English literature and the art of biography forever.