The White Mountain

As the story begins, we hear of the birth of triplets to a woman who's birthed three times previously, though each child died shortly thereafter. This time, however, the birth goes well, "as easy as birthing is for a nanny goat." That same night, a family of five suffocates in their beds from the smoke of their home fire. Telling the tale is a young man, a child of the village, who comes to understand the magic of life, death, poetry, and dreams. Both a shaman and a storyteller, our narrator, Dshurunkuwaa, learns to make a unique place for himself in this far-flung world of the Tuvan people. The White Mountain is Galsan Tschinag's wondrous final installment in a trilogy which began with Dshurunkuwaa's early years in The Blue Sky and continued with his adolescence in The Gray Earth. Gripping, lyrical, and full of mythic tales of life in a rural Mongolian village, The White Mountain is a classic of world literature written by one of its major figures.