Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia

After two years of working in the Mongol capital, Ulaanbaatar, Louisa Waugh moved to a remote village called Tsengel, which lies in the extreme west of Mongolia. Hearing Birds Fly is her story of the year she spent there, living and working with the Tsengel people who have made a home in this stark but beautiful landscape. Louisa describes with unflinching honesty how she slowly learns to fend for herself in a world where life is dominated by the seasons. The village characters and their culture emerge vividly as she shares her happiness, her frustrations and her occasional extreme loneliness and fear. She transports the reader from the end of a long hard winter, through a drought-stricken spring and into a lush summer that she spends in the mountains beyond Tsengel with a family of nomads. Together they return to the village for the 'short golden season' that is Mongolia's autumn, where Louisa remains until the middle of the following winter. Hearing Birds Fly is a unique and totally unsentimental account of life in a world where the act of survival is in itself a triumph of the human spirit. Book jacket.Louisa Waugh is the author of 'Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia' with ISBN 9780316861700 and ISBN 0316861707.