Hearing Birds Fly : A Year in a Mongolian Village

Frustrated by the increasingly bland character of Mongolia's capital city, Louisa Waugh yearned for the real Mongolia. Her chance came when she was summoned by a village head to Tsengel, a remote settlement far away in the west, near the Kazakh border. This passionately written account completely transports the reader to experience the glacial cold and witness the wonders of the Seven Kings as they steadily emerge from the horizon.

Waugh's time in the village was marked by coming to terms with the harshness of the climate and confronting new feelings about the treatment of animals, death, solitude and real loneliness, and the constant struggle to censor her reactions as an outsider. Through her eyes, we sense the trials as well as the joys, rivalries and even hostilities of village life—many of which she shared or knew about firsthand.

Above all, Waugh involves us with the locals' lives in such a way that we come to know them and care for their fates, creating an intimate portrait of a world far removed from our own.