The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian has finally come into print in the United States, thanks to Milkweed Editions. The winner of China’s most prestigious literary award, the Mao Dun Literature Prize, Zijian’s modern classic is a decades-long tale of the Evenki, an indigenous people of northern Asia spread across the forests of China and Siberia, and is translated by Bruce Humes. In 2013, the translation was first published in the United Kingdom and is a valuable and compelling work of indigenous literature.
For many reasons, this story is unique. The primary one is that it tells the story of a thousand-year-old people that many Western readers will be completely unfamiliar with, and might be surprised to learn that they flourished throughout the 20th century. The nomadic people who follow the path of the reindeer and depend on their shaman for powerful healing lived vibrant and rich lives until the world took away the conditions they needed for survival. While the book’s arc is grim, focusing on the environmental degradation imposed by the lumber industry, the political impacts of the Japanese, Russians, and Chinese, and the assimilation pushed on the Evenki by the People’s Republic of China, there are still thousands of Evenki living in the world, living in Mongolia, China, and Russia.
Our narrator is born into a harsh and beautiful world of the northern Asia mountain forests. They care for their reindeer, respect the nature that flourishes around them, and fall in love, have children, and have their hearts broken through the seasons. They aren’t entirely isolated; they trade with people in town, but live nomadically and preserve their ways. The characters are well-developed and hit emotionally. A young girl is lost in the snow. A shaman does his final dance, making sacrifices for the sake of saving lives. Petty feuds and rivals produce vile curses; love triangles form and fall.
The environment and reindeer are themselves characters. A plague hits the reindeer and threatens the community at large. Mountains are named and revisited; the community is careful not to insult the Mountain Spirit; a bear spares our narrator’s life, and she declines eating bear moving forward. The environment itself is constantly shifting yet well-known; our narrator and her urireng follow the shifting weather, land, and life to guide their own actions and inform their decision-making. It is an extremely scientific world that may feel almost magical to modern-day, technologically obsessed readers.
The biggest success of Zijian’s novel is in the spare yet poetic language, as our narrator tells her and her family’s story in the mode of oral storytelling, drawing in the reader as if they are sitting up against the fire with her, hearing about her first marriage, her grandchildren, the tragedies and difficult decisions, and magic triumphs she’s encountered. The oral narration is preserved through the careful, flowing translation of Taiwan-based writer Bruce Humes. It’s a historical epic of perseverance, and a powerful narrative of a community that may no longer exist as it once did. It walks that delicate balance between exposition and keeping the story feeling alive, and it does it well.
FICTION
By Chi Zijian
Milkweed Editions
Published January 13, 2026
