Here are twelve moving short stories about Taiwan and its people by one of the island's most popular writers, Cheng Ch'ing-wen. Focusing primarily on village life and the effects of modernization on Taiwan in the postwar years, Cheng is one of the most respected of the island's "nativist" writers, yet this is his first book to be translated into English.

This anthology represents the best of his fictional efforts across a forty-year span and encompasses his major themes: the tensions between men and women, parents and children, city and village, tradition and modernity. Taken individually, each story presents a moving portrait of paralysis, frustration, or self-realization. Together, they weave a complex tapestry of life in a rapidly changing country.

In the title story, an old man carves exquisite lame horses as both a penance for having terrorized a town as a police officer during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in World War II and a memorial to his deceased wife, who was nobler and more courageous than he. This book is a kind of gallery of three-legged horses: portraits of people maimed and transformedfor better or worse - by the suffering that life brings.