Meet the Author: 'The Ten Thousand Things' by John Spurling

The first Meet the Authors event of 2015 will feature John Spurling introducing his novel ‘The Ten Thousand Things’. In this book the author, playwright, reviewer and art critic turns his attention to fourteenth-century China, delivering an expertly researched historical novel full of fascinating details as well as action and riveting drama.

As usual, this Meet the Authors event will give you the opportunity to learn not only about the book itself, but also the stories behind it, as the author gives you his personal perspective on his work. John Spurling has woven together the topics of history, art, and China, and his explanation of how this book came about promises to be full of fascinating insights about these subjects as well as his life and creative process.

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 Even a reader who starts out with no interest in China or Chinese artists will be sure to return to this story over the years, as its truths remain timeless. South China Morning Post Review 

Agenda- Thursday 29th January 2015

Registration starts: 17:30

Talk, reading and Q & A session: 18:00 - 19:00

Book signing and networking: 19:00 - 19:30

Venue- Leeds University Business School, Maurice Keyworth Building, Room 1.09

Book Summary

Set in the final years of the Yuan Dynasty, THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS revolves around Wang Meng—a low-level government worker and gifted Chinese painter. Too astute to believe in an artist’s autonomy from society, and yet too devoted to his art to treat his job with requisite seriousness, Wang is always between two lives—never fully committed to one pursuit.

We follow Wang as he travels through an empire swept up by the Mongol invasion’s upheaval. In his wanderings, he encounters, among many memorable characters, other master painters of the period; a fierce female warrior known as the White Tigress who will recruit him as a military strategist; and an ugly young Buddhist monk who rises from beggary to extraordinary heights.

John Spurling captures the detail and specificity of fourteenth-century China in this expertly researched historical novel. He endows every description with the precision and depth the real-life Wang Meng brought to his paintings. It is a novel of fated meetings, grand battles, and riveting drama, and in its seamless fusion of the epic and the intimate, THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS achieves a truly singular beauty.

Praise for The Ten Thousand Things

‘It has the sort of sensual prose that makes the reader purr with delight and is surely destined to be one of the books of the year.’ The Daily Mail

‘This is a remarkable novel that deserves to be read slowly and savoured as one would a stunning landscape or a beautiful painting.’ Herald Scotland

Spurling's historical novel is a rare treasure. There is plenty of action, some of it quite violent … some of it breathtakingly tense as Wang strives to be a "virtuous" man according to his own belief system. He is no hero with a plan. Rather he dithers, hesitates, meanders and questions his way through life. But the story's delicate details never paint him as weak. He is more philosophical, and strives to remain detached from circumstances through his art. Even a reader who starts out with no interest in China or Chinese artists will be sure to return to this story over the years, as its truths remain timeless.’ South China Morning Post Review

‘Spurling is a scholar of art history, and his erudition and understanding are evident in his masterful characterization of Wang. Contemporary, yet of his time; complex, but never self-consciously or distractingly so, he is a creation reminiscent, in the subtlety and sophistication of his development, of Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s garlanded Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies... Spurling’s approach feels perfectly attuned to his subject, and one can pay no higher compliment than to say that on finishing the novel it is hard to believe that the work is anything other than the lost manuscript of the great Wang Meng himself.’ Asian Review of Books

 ‘… its huge sweep of time, its artful mix of fiction and history, its debate between the conflicting claims of art and power. I’ve never read anything like it … Great feats of scholarship and imagination have gone into making these people, so distant from us in space and time, live.’ Literary Review

‘Spurling has mastered many aspects of Chinese history and legend, from stories of past emperors to the elusive utopia to the Peach Blossom Valley myths… One of the most successful aspects of this novel is Spurling’s use of Chinese paintings by Wang Meng and others to describe landscapes and city scenes, recreating their images in words.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Told by Wang from the cell into which he has been thrust in his old age, the story of his career becomes an intelligent, graceful meditation on the difficulties of reconciling spiritual life with the material world’ The Sunday Times Culture Supplement

‘This intricately wrought study of medieval Chinese scholar-artists is wonderfully well imagined’ The Spectator

‘It is ostensibly a historical novel, but Spurling has in fact written a love letter to Chinese art’ New Statesman

Author Biography

John Spurling is the author of the novels The Ragged End, After Zenda, and A Book of Liszts. A prolific playwright, his work has been performed on television, radio, and stage, including at the National Theatre. Spurling is a frequent reviewer for The Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, The Observer, and The Art Newspaper. He was previously for twelve years the art critic of The New Statesman. He lives in London and Greece, and is married to the biographer Hilary Spurling.