✪ Over 6,000,000 copies sold in China
✪ Winner of the Mao Dun Literature Award
✪ Part of the “Vintage Earth” Collection alongside Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, and Wu Ming-Yi

"Chi has an extraordinary gift for storytelling and her steely narrator is a true heroine, surviving war and encroaching modernity. Simply magnificent." -- Times

“An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia - nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries... This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent” -- Financial Times

“A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them…”

At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.

Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it.