About the Author

Virginia Pye holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. A three-term president of James River Writers, a literary non-profit in Richmond, Virginia, she writes award-winning short stories that have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The North American Review, Tampa Review and The Baltimore Review.

Reviews

"A vividly imagined and beautifully drawn picture of the life of Christian missionaries in China in the early 20th century." -- Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China; co-author, Mao: the Unknown Story "A gemstone of a novel...River of Dust is a masterpiece." - Caroline Leavitt "The entire novel ultimately becomes an analogy for grief over a lost child, and China is simply the treacherous, foreign landscape on which it is laid. In the end, the sense of adventure beckons the characters more than the sense of loss buries them. Pye's hand manages to paint a rather naked response to what it means to move forward with only a sort of faithless hope." -- Style Weekly "Terrific, tremendous, wonderful...a strong, beautiful, deep book." -- Annie Dillard "Virginia Pye's River of Dust is a remarkable novel in the ways that delight me the most: It has a compelling narrative voice, a dynamic story and a deep resonance into the universal human condition, all of which is inextricably bound together. This is a major work by a splendid writer." -- Robert Olen Butler