Bridge of Birds
Subtitled A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was, Barry Hughart's 1984 World Fantasy Award winner is a love letter to Tang dynasty folklore, mystery puzzles, and the unmovable bond between a strong young farmer and an extremely disreputable old scholar. After the children of Number Ten Ox's village fall into a magical coma, he travels to Beijing and hires Master Li Kao, a sage with a slight flaw in his character and the worst hangover in the empire, to find the cure. Their search loops them through ghost-haunted libraries, mountaintop dragon kings, beautiful courtesans, and a centuries-old crime. Hughart's book is cheerful, sly, and impossibly inventive, the rare fantasy that earns the word delightful. Sadly out of print for years, it survives largely because every reader who finds it gives a copy away.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Bridge of Birds
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When the children of a Chinese village fall into a strange sleep, young Number Ten Ox finds the dingy office of Master Li, a brilliant scholar with a slight flaw in his character, and they go hunting a cure.
Bridge of Birds was written by Barry Hughart and published in 1984. It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and is the first book in his Master Li and Number Ten Ox trilogy.
Barry Hughart wrote three Master Li novels: Bridge of Birds, The Story of the Stone, and Eight Skilled Gentlemen. Hughart stopped after the third due to a publishing dispute, though he had planned more.
Bridge of Birds is 248 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Bridge of Birds takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Bridge of Birds is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Bridge of Birds is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.