BRITISH novelist Susan Barker’s latest book, “The Incarnations,” details the six lives of a Beijing taxi driver through a pattern of repeated death and rebirth across a thousand years of Chinese history.

The present scene is set in modern Beijing. As Driver Wang circles the city’s congested streets, he finds a letter in the sun visor of his cab. It is written by someone who claims to be his soulmate and to have known him in many of his previous lives.

More letters follow, taking Wang back in time: to a spirit-bride in the Tang Dynasty (618-907); to young slaves during the Mongol invasion; to concubines plotting to kill the emperor; to a kidnapping during the Opium War; and to Red Guards at time of the “cultural revolution” (1966-76).

“I moved from the UK to Beijing in 2007 to learn life and experience in a very passive way, which later helped shape the book,” Barker said at a reading in Shanghai last month.

“But I used a more active approach to research and writing the historical stories. The five previous lives of Driver Wang represent specific eras in China’s history that I find quite interesting and wanted to write about.”

Describing life from the viewpoint of a taxi driver was also a great way of creating a picture of the city, Barker told Reuters in a recent interview.

“I’ve met a lot of interesting cab drivers in Beijing and Shenzhen. I always make it my business to sit up front and make small talk,” she said.

“Taxi drivers in Beijing are always men of stories. Surprising things and views of the world come out, and I wanted Beijing’s geography — all the traffic, architecture, pollution and concrete — to have a strong presence as a book,” she said.

“Also, Wang is a very common Chinese surname. So he is, but is not, a Chinese everyman.”

When asked about the use of same-sex attraction to portray the central relationship throughout the book, Barker said she has always considered sexuality to be a very fluid thing.

“How you can fall in love with someone and spend your life with them and it doesn’t matter what gender they are.

“Maybe that’s a naive thing to say, but I’m very removed from the sexual politics of it all,” she said.

“The gay relationship in the modern-day section came about organically; it seemed quite natural to put (the characters) in a situation where they’re attracted to each other and they have sex and (the main character) Wang is quite conflicted about it. And of course at that time homosexuality was classified as a mental illness that was very taboo in society.”

Sweeping between China’s past and present, “The Incarnations” illuminates the cyclical nature of history and shows how man is condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

The book has been described by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Johnson as “the most extraordinary work of imagination you’ll read all year.”

Barker, whose father is British and mother is Malaysian Chinese, said the novel was the product of years of intensive research, mostly in the years after she moved to Beijing.

The author of two previous novels: “Sayonara Bar” and “The Orientalist and the Ghost,” Barker said: “Power struggles are always the theme of my books.”

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

“Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill. It’s a novel about the disintegration of a marriage, written in poetic and fragmentary prose. The narrator (the wife) is a neurotic, insomniac writer. I relate to her.

Which books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

I like to revisit any novel that has made me cry and reread the most affecting pages like some weird emotional junkie/masochist.

On the list would be: “The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje, “Fugitive Pieces” by Anne Michaels, “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem, “Let The Great World Spin” by Colum McCann, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz, “White Noise” by Don DeLillo, “The Emigrants” by W G Sebald, the biographies of Simone De Beauvoir, “The Collected Stories” of Lydia Davis, and “The Professor of Poetry” by Grace McCleen.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

I have different favorite novelists for different times in my life.

After discovering “Number 9 Dream” in Japan at age 22, David Mitchell was (for a few years) a literary god to me. I also adore every book that Zadie Smith has ever written.

What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And how would you describe the kinds of books you steer clear off?

I like all kinds of stories — anything that impresses me with its truth and beauty. I don’t discriminate over genre.

I jettison anything that has an implausible plot and weak, underwritten characters.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

I was not a very bookish child. My mother would sometimes drop my sister and me off at the library when she had to go shopping, and we’d run around and knock books off the shelves.

When I was very young, I loved Enid Blyton and her world of posh, adventurous 1950s children. (I used to beg to be sent away to boarding school.)

Moving toward adolescence, my favorite writers were Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, Paul Zindel, Stephen King, lots of trashy horror novels, and (in secret) my mother’s Mills and Boon.

I also read the “Sweet Valley High” series, though the squeaky clean Wakefield twins were nothing like any of the 16-year-old girls I knew.

Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer?

Probably the novels I read in Japan (circa 2001-02) have inspired me to become a fiction writer in the first place. “Norwegian Wood” and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles” by Haruki Murakami. And also David Mitchell’s first two novels.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

The books that I began then put aside because they overtaxed my brain. So, “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” by James Joyce, “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon, and anything by Henry James.

What are you most eagerly anticipating in 2014?

David Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks.” I didn’t fall in love with “A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (released in 2010), but am hopeful about his latest.