Ji Lianna passionately tends to her flower garden and avoids looking back at her life with remorse. Xiao’e does not know the first thing about plants and cannot stop thinking about her past.
Eighty-year-old Ji Lianna is a child of the Jewish diaspora, and young Xiao’e is not sure whether she is human at all. The two women could not be more different. Yet, in a numbingly cold Harbin flat in an old Russian villa, an unlikely friendship blossoms between them. Soon their dark histories come back to haunt them as they realise they have more in common than just a shared address.
Chi Zijian was born in Mohe in 1964. She started writing while at school and had her first story published in Northern Literature magazine when she was at college. She is the only writer to have won the Lu Xun Literary Award three times. The Last Quarter of the Moon also won the Mao Dun Literary Award.
