The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

To cross land that has, since the end of the last century, been turning against its occupants; to face strangeness for which we do not have the language to describe; to build a railway to safely carry us over all those perilous miles.

Weiwei is the child of the train. Born neither here nor there, in no country, under no emperor’s star, she came bawling into the world as her mother left it, at the very mid-point of the Wastelands, on the floor of the Third Class sleeping car, on a night when phosphorescence turned the creatures of the plains into ghosts.