"Is there barbed wire in the sky? He wondered while laughing like a child."

Each of these six novellas and short stories, written by Mongolian writer Ayonga since the turn of the century, begins from a different perspective; collectively, they encapsulate the author's reverence and rousing call for traditional culture and humanism in the Mongolian lands: a shepherd, whose unfailing goodness verges on timidity, sets out to find their abandoned homeland; an expert marksman gripped by unshakeable melancholy finds sympathy in a wolf pack; a monstrous vehicle tears through herders' long stable ecology; a woman leads a life outside convention, forthright and resolute; a young woman married off for wealth to an aging man decides self-destruction is the only way to love and freedom; a man swindles and cheats in the name of questionable admiration.

This work represents a plaintive song for a nomadic culture being eroded away and deformed by industrialism.

About the author

Ayonga is an author of Mongolian ethnicity. Born in 1947 in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, he has published a number of works including the three novels, Mamba Rasang (tr. Jim Weldon), Old House on the Prairie, and Tuoba Liwei. He has received the Junma Literary Award for Ethnic Minority Writers and the China Writers Publishing Group Prize for Outstanding Works. He is former chair of the Inner Mongolian Federation of Literary and Art Circles.