Hearing Birds Fly

Louisa Waugh went to live in a village in western Mongolia, to teach English, where she learned more than she thought she would. She learned about religion, lush summers, dusts storms, hard winters, loneliness, fear, happiness, yummy horse meat and dealing with death. For all the information in the book it reads pretty swiftly and I finished it within a couple of days, when not working, sleeping or eating. It really is a hard book to put down and a lovely one to add to my library of Asian books. I really felt sorry for her sometimes.

This is a book by a woman, who goes to Mongolia, discovers how much she likes the country and then goes back to it years later, lives there for two years, then teaches in a remote village of nomads. the book is about her time spent in the village of nomads teaching them English. she describes life in the village and the people there and how it was for a foriegner, who grew up in London, to be totally surrounded by such a foreign and alien environment. very good read. i highly recommend it.

could not put book down... really helped to understand 'the mongolian way'..... a keeper!

Mongolia is the kind of place that captures the imagination. So big, so cold, so remote. I have had the incredible good fortune to travel there myself. Louisa Waugh does an exceptional job of evoking a sense of the remote village where she lived, and the tough, resourceful people who teach her to survive. There are other writers who have done this, but Waugh has captured the spirit of Mongolian women better than any other writer on the subject. This is a marvelous, beautiful book that makes me miss Mongolia all over again.

This book gave me an intense experience of Tsengel, a village of a few thousand on the farthest western edge of Mongolia. I loved spending four seasons there with Louisa Waugh. The author won the first Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize for a work of fiction or non-fiction (this is non-fiction) "evoking the spirit of a place". Waugh has done this superbly. The reader is there with her so fully because she has added her own joys and hardships of that year in Tsengel without a hint of solipsism. She is a generous woman and a generous author. Reading this boook is a great experience.