Caravans

Caravans is a novel by James A. Michener, the American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of historical fiction. The simplified Chinese edition was translated by Guo Wen and published by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House in 2013. The story begins in the Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1946: Ellen Jasper, an American girl from Philadelphia, marries an Afghan and then loses contact with her family, and Mark Miller, a young man working at the American embassy in Kabul, is assigned to find her. He travels south from Kabul to Kandahar, crossing deserts and the ruins of ancient trade routes, and witnesses brutal public executions, tribal lynchings, the skeletal remains left by Genghis Khan's massacre, and a camel caravan that has come down from the savage ages of mankind. In the end he finds Ellen, who has already taken up the migratory life of the nomadic Kuchi people—she repeatedly abandons her old life in search of a new way of living, always remaining in "wandering." Using the search mission as its thread, the novel interweaves personal travel with the historical sweep of Alexander the Great's eastern campaign and his marriage to a queen, the eastward spread of Buddhism from this region into China, and the repeated rise of steppe empires, pondering the conflicts between modern civilization and ancient tradition, freedom and belonging, migration and settling. The work is known for its exotic atmosphere, intricate plot, and historical weight, and is regarded as one of Michener's representative works; it once ranked near the top of Publishers Weekly's annual bestseller list of American fiction.