Please find reviews and articles below.
ABC.net.au
Date: Monday, May 10, 2016
Interview: Tony Grey: The Tortoise in Asia
You might have heard the story of a community in Western China where people have blue or green eyes, long noses, and fair hair. Popular legend has it that these people are descended from Roman legionnaires who once travelled the Silk Road.
Tony Grey’s new book, The Tortoise in Asia, imagines the lives of some of the legionnaires who may have left Rome and ended up in Liqian, China.
The Australian
Date: Monday, March 26, 2016
Reviews: Grey’s Tortoise in Asia, Jopson’s Oliver in the Levant
by Peter Pierce
View the original article here
Two first-time novelists have brought their experience and fascination to works set far from home. Tony Grey’s The Tortoise in Asia takes place in the last century BC along the Silk Road, a trade route that ran for thousands of kilometres from Rome to Chang’an in China (the Han capital near modern Xian). East and west were linked across two continents. Grey, who has been a stage actor, mining entrepreneur and arts patron, has often returned to this history-steeped landscape. He was particularly drawn to one of the more curious legends of the road, which suggested that a cohort of Roman legionnaires, captured after the disastrous defeat by the Parthians at Carrhae in 53BC, became mercenaries, first for the Xiung Nu (or Huns) and then for the Han. Eventually they settled in Gansu province in western China. Improbably large traces of Caucasian DNA are still found in the local population, while every year at the town of Liqian there is a “much talked about Roman paradeâ€. How this might have come about is the essence of Grey’s story.
Sydney Morning Herald
Date: Monday, March 4, 2016
Tony Grey: books that changed me
Tony Grey AM is a stage actor, lawyer, mining entrepreneur, businessman, arts patron and author, whose writing is informed by travel for his work with international mining ventures. His latest book, The Tortoise in Asia