Armed with a copy of Monkey and a Mandarin phrasebook, and with a craving for skewered lamb, Australian writer Kate James travelled across the deserts of northwest China in the footsteps of three early-20th-century Christian missionaries and their adopted daughter. Kate had became drawn to the writings of three extraordinary women, Mildred Cable and the sisters Eva and Francesca French who spent most of their lives in in China, adopted a deaf Mongolian girl called Topsy and braved sandstorms and warlordsto cross the barren Gobi desert on a Bible-laden donkey cart five times between 1923 and 1936: This is a beautifully written travel tale full of humour and adventure -about a part of the world that sees few foreign travellers, even today.