The Girl from Samarcand

Hammersmith Clarke is a man possessed, not by madness, but by memory. A collector of rare rugs, he acquires a hypnotic piece from Samarcand, its intricate threads weaving more than patterns. Within its fibers lives the Yellow Girl: a hauntingly beautiful woman from his past life, a love he lost to time itself. As Clarke succumbs to the rug's enchantment, his marriage to Diane crumbles. The carpet becomes a doorway, and he finds himself drawn through it, back to a life where he and the Yellow Girl were together before death tore them apart. Price's 1929 fantasy pulses with a dreamlike urgency, the supense of a man choosing between the living and the dead, between what is and what was. It captures something primal: the terrifying possibility that we have loved before, that we will love again, and that some bonds transcend even death. For readers who crave gothic romance filtered through exotic fantasy, who wonder what treasures the past might hold.