When bicycles first became mass-market objects back in the 1890s, they changed the world. Not, oddly enough, for the middle-class men who had invented and popularised them, but for ordinary working people and women. Suddenly there was a good, solid, cheap escape vehicle that emancipated women not just from the world of men, but from home, and boredom.

Suzanne Joinson's debut novel is formed half of the imaginary narrative of one of those early lady cyclists making her way across what is now Kyrgyzstan to establish a Christian mission in Kashgar. At the same time, a modern-day traveller returns from work abroad to find a homeless Yemeni film-maker outside her flat painting feathers on the wall. She takes him in at the same time she discovers that, as the sole beneficiary of a woman she's never met, she is now responsible for a house, a garden and an owl.

Joinson is the literature programme manager for the British Council, and knows whereof she speaks. Not just of the distant places she's writing about, but of the dust and the depression and the sense of escape not really completed. For better or worse, that experience radiates through the novel  ghostly traces of reports she's written or observations she's made while sitting in departure lounges waiting for connections. At times, the novel has the sense of something that started out as a more conventional travel narrative and which became, after several redrafts, a book with a different trajectory and a different conclusion.

This one  the published version  is lovely, perceptive, and occasionally a little gauche. But what radiates from its two leading ladies, and what sticks after the last page, is a brave and terrible loneliness. Joinson conveys the endurance but also the empty-headedness of those lady travellers who set out to convert the heathen world  then or now  and who returned with less than they left with. Perhaps once the conclusions she came to were bleaker than the finished version, but Joinson seems too fundamentally optimistic to come to a dark ending. Despite the draw of heat and dust, both her ladies reach love in milder, more surprising climates.