During China's collectivist era in the late 1950s, a rural work team responsible for building an floodgate receives a strange new recruit: Hei-hai, a skinny, silent and a feral boy. Assigned to assist the blacksmith at the worksite forge, Hei-hai proves superhumanly indifferent to pain or suffering and yet, eerily sensitive to the natural world.

(Paperback)

(Paperback)

Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese 0battle both the Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s.