Her family lived in houses of rammed earth and thatch — warm in winter, cool in summer, but prone to leaking. Life in the highlands was cold, so people wore thick clothing at home and lighter, often ill-fitting donated clothes when traveling for school or trade.

Zha says that as a child, without know ledge about the outside world for comparison, she did not perceive any of this as poverty.

Before starting school, she was a "wild" child growing up with animals — dogs, cattle, chickens, birds, fish, even snakes and insects — forming what she calls her private spiritual world.

"There is a part of that world I can't directly share with other people. There is a room with a door no one else can see. Only I know it exists, and I have been drawing power from it," she writes at the start of the book.

She began learning Mandarin at seven and left home for junior middle school at 12. In 2011, she left college and landed a job as a TV journalist, then quit eight years later to write full-time. Before this latest work, under the pen name Nanshan, she published five mystery novels, three of which were adapted for TV and radio.