In this collection of dispatches from China’s far northwestern province of Xinjiang, Li Juan recalls helping her mother to grow sunflowers from the barren earth. Li Juan’s skill as a writer captures the extraordinary everyday in this sensitive and lively record of both the fragility of life, and the joys and dignity of family bonds.

‘The earth’s most powerful force is not its quake, but rather  its ability to be home for myriad creatures to grow’ 

An iron-willed mother, an ageing grandmother, a pair of mismatched dogs and 90 acres of less-than-ideal farmland: these are Li Juan’s companions on the steppes of the Gobi Desert.

Writing out of a yurt under Xinjiang’s endless horizons, she documents her family’s quest to extract a bounty of sunflowers amid the harsh beauty and barren expanses of China’s northwest frontier. Success must be eked out in the face of life’s unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death.

While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?

About the Author

Li Juan was born in the summer of 1979 at a construction outpost in Xinjiang, the vast northwesterly province that borders the steppes of central Asia.

Her warm, reflective and often philosophical style dwells upon both the people and landscape of Xinjiang’s Altay Prefecture – a home to China’s Kazakh minority – with equal care and consideration.

Her works have received a huge response at home and abroad, securing numerous awards and finding publication in French, Arabic and Korean.

Distant Sunflower Fields won the 2018 Lu Xun Literature Award and is the first of Li Juan’s books to be published in English translation.