The Street of Everyday Miracles

The cat has begun to lead, and the city has begun to answer.

A commission arrives from nowhere. Then there is a calligrapher, and a musician playing in a moonlit courtyard no map records. These are small serendipities he cannot explain away, and slowly he stops trying. Beneath a dumpling stall, a tangle of harnesses makes a severe old Vietnamese woman laugh for the first time in decades. But Lina grows cool when he speaks of miracles, and at an ordinary street corner she freezes and will not say why. Then the paperwork that has followed him from Hangzhou comes due and his own heart begins to falter. The household he has made in a basement flat meets the one loss no one can bargain with. Book II of four, on Kindle.