All things tending towards the eternal

Traveling through China in 1989, not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Fanny hopes to make sense of her brother Bruno's death in a motorcycle accident by finding a woman with whom he had exchanged letters. On her journey Fanny's fate becomes entwined with a handsome British rogue, an American of Russian-Cuban descent returning to Tashkent, and two Chinese men--one who loves Charles Dickens, the other a budding, entrepreneurial con man--struggling to find their way in a country undergoing tumultuous transformation.