Yu Erlong, a veteran guerrilla captain of the Chinese Communist Party, is returning to a remote place to confront his past. Stone Lake was where he grew up in poverty on a fishing boat and then fought against the Kuomintang and the Japanese for control of his motherland. It was also the scene of the shooting of his beloved wife, Luhua. Thirty years after that cowardly murder, Erlong, with flowers in hand, is determined to find Luhua's remains and solve the mystery of who pulled the trigger.

The second volume of Li Guowen's award-winning Spring in Winter explores a web of personal relationships against the backdrop of four decades of tumultuous political change in China, from the civil war in the 1930s to the end of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s.