About the Author

          I came late to writing novels. Much of my life was taken up with reporting across the globe on upheavals of all kinds, political and natural, and it was all enormously satisfying. Until it wasn’t. As a foreign correspondent, there used to be a fine balance between the stories that were awful but important – conflict, societies cracking up, injustices galore – and stories that were so wonderfully zany as to be sublime: an Indian princess who lived in the jungle ‘talking’ to her elephants; a reincarnate lama returning to his nomad pastures in Tibet after 50 years in exile; a Korean sailor who was washed overboard in the Indian ocean and found alive, eight hours later, floating astride a giant turtle. I lived for those amazing stories.

          But 9/11 changed all that. It became war, war and more war. And I found that when I tried to write about the terrifying and life-altering experiences of people caught up in these traumas, I fell short. The medium of journalism, with its limits of space, meant that my editors, in their attempt to squeeze a story into meager column inches, would red-pencil out most of everything that brought people to life, that revealed their agony, their loves, their truth.

       So this novel should have been about war. It isn’t. I tell myself it’s because I felt a need to put a few centuries between myself and the bend of madness the world was taking around me.  But the truth is more of a cliché: sometimes an idea hits you and you just can’t walk away from it.

       In my case, it was reading a line or two in a scholarly book on ancient Chinese maritime science - how the First Emperor of Chin sent a Taoist priest, Xu Fu, to find the Isle of the Immortals, somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, and bring back the fabled elixir of Immortality. What if, I thought, this monk didn’t believe in the concept of immortality of the flesh - as the emperor clearly did? Yet the monk knew that if he refused, or if he tried and failed to bring back the magic potion, the emperor would publicly execute him in the most horrible way. He chose to sail into the unknown.

          Perhaps I was more susceptible to Xu Fu’s dilemma because, at the time, I was in Hong Kong, on R & R from covering the war in Afghanistan, and staying on a Chinese junk. Anchored in the harbor, I would idly watch the freighters churn along into the Pacific, and I would imagine what that same voyage must have been like for Xu Fu aboard his raft in 220 BC. Daydreaming about his ancient voyage turned out to be a healthy dose of escapism for me. When I returned to Afghanistan and later when I reported on fighting in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, the good monk was there in my mind when I needed him. 

          Once I let the wind and currents drive Xu Fu’s vessel onto the Maya shores, I couldn’t resist old journalistic impulses. I decided to weave in my own experiences in contemporary Mexico, where I reported on the dark nexus between drug cartels, the military and antiquities smugglers.

          Now I owe it to Xu Fu to tell his story, or rather, my fanciful version of what I wish had happened to him.

Biography                                                                                                                                                                                   

        Tim McGirk is a former bureau chief and war correspondent for Time magazine, who has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the hunt for al-Qaeda. He also worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America for Time and prior to that for the British daily The Independent and The Sunday Times, where he served as Foreign Manager (as did, several decades earlier, James Bond creator Ian Fleming).

    His exposé on the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha by U.S. Marines won the UK Foreign Press Association’s Print Story of the Year in 2006. He was awarded the Henry Luce Prize for International Reporting, the 2006 SOPA award for Excellence in Feature Writing. Twice he was a finalist for the US National Magazine Awards.

  His journalism has also appeared in National Geographic, The Believer, Esquire (UK), and The Spectator. McGirk’s biography “Wicked Lady, Salvador Dali’s Muse,” was published in the UK and translated into five languages. As part of The Sunday Times’ Insight Team, he also co-authored “Rainbow Warrior: The French Attempt to Sink Greenpeace.” After leaving his posting for Time as Jerusalem Bureau Chief in 2009, he returned to the U.S. and taught international and investigative reporting at U.C. Berkeley's School of Journalism and served as managing editor of the Investigative Reporting Program. 

  Born in Bogotá, Colombia, McGirk currently lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife, and within sight of the Pacific Ocean.