The White Mountain

Written in the style of great sagas, a majestic novel of a young man's journey to adulthood completes "Tschinag's dazzling … Mongolian triptych" (TIME Magazine).

The story begins with the arrival of triplets, born to a woman who has given birth three times previously, and buried each child shortly thereafter. This time the delivery goes well. 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, Dshurukuwaa, a child from the village, who comes to understand his unique place as a shaman and a storyteller in this far-flung world of the Tuvan people.

The White Mountain is Galsan Tshinag's wondrous final installment in a trilogy that began with The Blue Sky and continued in The Gray Earth. It chronicles the coming-of-age of a nomadic Mongolian boy as he searches for personal identity amidst the tension between the modern socialist education of Mongolia and the centuries-old traditions of his Tuvan people. As he develops his shamanic powers and poetic gifts, Dshurukuwaa discovers the tragedy and magic of love, life, poetry, and dreams. Gripping and lyrical, The White Mountain is sure to become a classic of world literature.

Galsan Tschinag is a major voice in world literature. Called Irgit Schynykbaj-oglu Dshurukuwaa in his native Tuvan, he was born in the early forties in Mongolia. He studied at the University of Leipzig where he adopted German as his written language. He is the only member of the Tuvan tribe to use written language to tell stories, and thus to publish. His novel, The Blue Sky, was the first of his books to be available in English, though he is the author of more than thirty books which have been translated into French, Spanish, and Polish. As the chief of Tuvans in Mongolia, Tschinag led his people, scattered under Communist rule, back in a huge caravan to their original home in the high Altai Mountains. He currently lives alternately in the Altai, Ulaanbaatar, and Germany.

Katharina Rout teaches English and Comparative Literature at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her translations from the German have been acclaimed widely.