All things tending towards the eternal

the long version

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.