In the year BC 35, it is recorded that 145 Roman soldiers settled in northwestern China. How did they get there? This novel creates a narrative starting thirty years before, following the fortunes and misfortunes of one of those soldiers, Marcus, as he fights with Julius Caesar in Gaul and with Marcus Licinius Crassus against the Parthians. Some of the Roman soldiers are taken prisoner by the Parthians but escape and head eastwards. This story from more than 2,000 years ago spans continents and the ages and provides a base for one of the most fascinating mysteries of northwest China.

Brian McElney was born in Hong Kong in the early 1930s, and for more than two decades was one of the territory's top lawyers. But in his spare time, he also put together one of the most comprehensive collections of East Asian antiques in the world, many of them spotted by him amongst the knick-knacks on Hollywood Road and Cat Street. His memoir, Collecting China, starts at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, when it was just not known whether the Red Guards would storm over the border and start smashing up porcelain on the Mid-Levels, and then tells tales ranging from the Hong Kong of the 1930s through to the establishment by Brian of what is today the only museum specialising in Chinese antiquities in the United Kingdom - the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath.