Two Beginnings: A Guest Post by Sarah Brooks
A thrilling journey aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, here mystery meets fantasy and historical fiction dances with horror. Brimming with twists and surprises, this is an inventive adventure tale featuring an eclectic cast of characters. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Sarah Brooks on writing The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands.
Paperback $18.99
The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands: A Novel
The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands: A Novel
By Sarah Brooks
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.99
For fans of Piranesi and The Midnight Library, a STUNNING HISTORICAL FANTASY set on a grand express train, about a group of passengers on a dangerous journey across a MAGICAL LANDSCAPE
For fans of Piranesi and The Midnight Library, a STUNNING HISTORICAL FANTASY set on a grand express train, about a group of passengers on a dangerous journey across a MAGICAL LANDSCAPE
This book has two beginnings, and both involve journeys. The first beginning takes place an undisclosed number of years ago, when I was an undergrad studying in Beijing, and decided that travelling back home to the UK overland would be a suitably adventurous way of spending the summer. So with two friends I set off on the Trans-Siberian Express, travelling first to Mongolia, then on to Moscow. For five days we became part of the odd little community of the train, making friends in languages we didn’t really speak (with the help of card games and shots of liquor), and spending hours watching grasslands and forests unfurl outside the train windows as one continent turned into another.
The second beginning also took place far from home, and on yet another continent. This time it was many years later in Seattle, where I was lucky enough to go to the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop for SFF writers. Finding myself in need of a short story idea, I tried desperately to think of something that would impress my amazing classmates and our tutor for that week (who just happened to be George R.R. Martin, which added to the pressure). A title popped into my head, and I knew at once that it was a nineteenth century travel guide to a dangerous landscape that could only be crossed by armoured train: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands. What kind of landscape could be so threatening that no-one could set foot in it, I wondered? One that could drive you mad, if you looked at it too closely. One that was closed off to the world until a company had the bravery or hubris to build a railway right through it. And what would such a journey do to the train’s passengers and crew? I remembered my own journey on the Trans-Siberian Express and how, if you stared out of the window for too long, you began to feel that something in the trees was staring back at you…
Back home in Yorkshire, that short story ended up growing into something much longer. I was doing a PhD at the time, looking at monsters in seventeenth century Chinese ghost stories (continuing my earnest efforts to avoid the real world as much as possible), and this fed into the landscape of the Wastelands and the blurred boundaries between civilisation and the wilds, and the encounter between a young woman born on the train and a strange stowaway, who changes everything she thinks she knows.
I’m so grateful for the journeys that began this novel, and the way they’ve changed my own ways of seeing the world. It’s been fantastic seeing the book go off on travels of its own, and I’m especially happy to see it come out in paperback in the US, because it was here that its first words were written, so I feel that in some ways the train has found its way back home.