In the summer of 1907, a madcap brigade inaugurated the first international motor rally from Peking to Paris. The race included only five cars and their crews who wrote their agreed code of conduct on the back of a menu the night before the start. The only navigational aids were the sun and telegraph poles. Ninety years later, the race ran again. Rosie Thomas and her companion, Phil Bowen a thirty-year old climber, pearl-diver, charter-boat skipper and photographer were two of those daring enough to go for the challenge. On 6 September 1997, an assembly 110 vintage cars gathered in Peking, with the finish line in Paris lying 45 days and 16,000 kilometres ahead halfway across the world. The excitement of the daily time challenge, the strange camaraderie, the test of sleeping outdoors, in flea-pit hotels, in foreign lands, is more than matched by Rosie's own internal journey, including a near death experience at the top of the Himalayas.
Author
Janey King, née Morris was born on 1947 in Denbigh, Wales, and also grew up in North Wales. She read English at Oxford, and after a spell in journalism and publishing began writing fiction after the birth of her first child. Published since 1982 as Rosie Thomas, she has written fourteen best-selling novels, deal with the common themes of love and loss. She is one of only a few authors to have won twice the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association, in 1985 with Sunrise, and in 2007 with Iris and Ruby. Janey is an adventurer and once she was established as a writer and her children were grown, she discovered a love of travelling and mountaineering. She has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, spent time on a tiny Bulgarian research station in Antarctica and travelled the silk road through Asia. She currently lives in London.
