Mirror the true survival of a group of farmers living in western China,who have lived so hard and helplessly, but still have a tenacious and positive attitude towards their fate.
Desert Rites is a realistic depiction of China’s rural life in the second half of the twentieth century and epitomizes a generation of farmers’ struggle with survival and fate.It takes the author Xuemo twenty years to write this novel.There are no great figures in this book. What touches people most are those scenes that depict little details in everyday life, and those parts about the struggle of soul that each life goes through when confronted with sufferings from reality. The whole book was written a Tolstoy-like style. Focusing on vividly depicting the characters’ psychological life, it faithfully records a year of life of a farmer family in western China that is typical to the era. For example, faced with life’s harship, faced with love that is unlikely to come to fruition, Lingguang, the hero of the book, witnessed a family’s history of suffering, and witnessed the hopeless silence and helpless struggle of the soul of a generation of people on the land of western China. Finally, in his desperate quest for answers, Lingguang chose to leave his hometown, heading towards the desert of his soul, heading towards the lonely land that no one had ever known.

In 2016, the prominent translator Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin completed the English translation of the novel.