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Where to start with Yan Lianke

Hard Like Water

The new masterpiece by eminent Chinese writer Yan Lianke . . . two revolutionaries take matters disastrously into their own hands while conducting a crazed affair

A blistering tour de force . . . Carlos Rojas's exceptional translation makes English feel new again. Yan's linguistic daring, and the novel's relentless stream of provocative images and observations, create a sensuous and riveting world . . . a sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology

A fascinating work . . . Yan's challenge, to his samizdat readers in China and those beyond, is to look in the murky glass of ambition and self-deception and find the face that resembles their own

A vivid, even lurid, portrait of the vandalistic savagery and hypocrisy of the post-1966 Cultural Revolution . . . Well-served by Carlos Rojas's agile and richly textured translation

The novel, a parody, sets itself up as a kind of Maoist Anna Karenina . . . At its core, Hard Like Water seeks to make a mockery of claims to political purity. As Hongmei and Aijun arouse each other with propaganda slogans and revolutionary citations, the novel pokes fun at how easily an ideology can be contorted to satisfy individual desires

A piercing satire of Communism and the language of revolutions

Yan probes the darkness and absurdity of Chinese society and history with a sexy satirical tale of the Cultural Revolution as wrought in a small village . . . distinctive and punchy. Yan's exuberant and unflinching tragicomedy is undeniably appealing

Surreal and amusing, biting and fun

A gritty, memorable story . . . Yan's study of power and class struggle becomes, in the end, a near-classic tragedy

Yan's signature biting wit creates another indelible work of bittersweet humor and socio-political insight

Predicted to become a new future classic . . . this is a powerful, multi-faceted book that questions everything from marriage to sexual desire, power and the dangers of hubris

Gao Aijun, the narrator of this boisterous novel, set during the Cultural Revolution, finds his life charmless: his village is like "a pool of stagnant water," and his wife makes him feel "a clump of cotton" in his throat. Then he meets a beautiful woman, also married, and, to attract her, sets out to lead the "revolution" in their village. In speech larded with Mao quotes and traditional maxims, Gao reveals how their romance, fuelled by the feverish political climate, pitches the village into ever-escalating extremism -- a years-long parade of self-advancing schemes culminating in an unthinkable end

Yan Lianke is the author of works including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Day the Sun Died. He has been awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award and was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He has received two of China’s most prestigious literary honours, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award. He was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China.

'The new masterpiece by eminent Chinese writer Yan Lianke . . . two revolutionaries take matters disastrously into their own hands while conducting a crazed affair' MARGARET ATWOOD on Twitter 
 
A breakneck adventure story following the erotic love affair of party cadres Aijun and Hongmei during China's Cultural Revolution 
 
This is the story of the freewheeling love affair between married soldier Aijun and Hongmei, a beautiful young woman from his village in the Balou Mountains. 
 
Intoxicated with one another, Aijun and Hongmei hurl themselves into their town's revolutionary struggle. Spending their days and nights stamping out feudalism, writing pamphlets and organising rallies, they become inseparable: they are the engines of history. 
 
But as their political activity reaches new heights, so does the danger of getting caught... 
 
'A blistering tour-de-force... Sensuous and riveting' MADELEINE THIEN, Booker-shortlisted author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing 
 
'Fascinating... This tale of an illicit tryst during the Cultural Revolution is a stinging satire' The Times 
 
**A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST FICTION IN TRANSLATION BOOK 2021**

Serve the People!

A brilliantly comic satire about a love affair from the visionary, world-class storyteller

One of China's greatest living authors and fiercest satirists

Brilliantly exposes the emptiness of Maoist ideals and the fraudulent ends for which they were used, but also relates a sorrowful tale of compromised relationships and modest hopes left unfulfilled

A scathing sendup of life in 1960s China during the chaos of the country's Cultural Revolution...a wonderfully biting sature, brimming with absurdity, humor and wit

A brilliantly comic satire about a love affair from the visionary, world-class storyteller. 
 
Set in 1967, at the peak of the Mao cult, this is the tale of a forbidden love affair between Liu Lian - the bored wife of a military commander - and a young soldier, Wu Dawang. 
 
When Liu Lian establishes a rule that Wu Dawang must attend to her needs whenever the household's wooden 'Serve the People!' sign is removed from its usual place, he vows to obey. What follows is both an enthralling love story and a deliciously comic satire on the political and sexual taboos of Mao's regime. 
 
'Drips with the kind of satire that can only come from deep within the machinery of Chinese communism' Financial Times

Dream of Ding Village

From 'one of the masters of modern Chinese literature' (Jung Chang), a searing novel that traces the destruction of a community in Communist China

One of China's most successful fiction writers

Yan Lianke denounces an alarming situation...his novel is a true revelation

A sorrowful but captivating novel about the price of progress in modern China... Resonates with the impact of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama

'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung Chang 
 
A searing novel that traces the destruction of a community in communist China. 
 
Told through the eyes of Xiao Qiang, a young boy, this deeply moving novel shares the tragic story of the blood-contamination scandal in China's Henan province. 
 
Looking for a way to lift Ding Village from poverty, its directors and organisers open blood-plasma collection stations, hoping to sell the plasma to those in need. At first the scheme is a commercial success. Soon, however, whole communities are wiped out after contracting HIV. As Xiao narrates the fate of Ding Village, his family is torn apart by suspicion and retribution. 
 
'The defining work of his career... A devastating critique of China's runaway development' Guardian

The Years, Months, Days

A powerful fable about the goodness in mankind by 'one of China's greatest living authors' (Guardian), newly available in English for the first time.

A terrible drought hits the population of a small mountain village and they flee to better climes. Incapable of marching for days, one old man and his blind dog stay behind, keeping watch over his single ear of corn. Every day is a victory over death. 
 
The Years, Months, Days is a universal story, an homage to all that is good in mankind. A bestseller in China and now available in English for the first time, this is a powerful, moving fable by ‘one of China’s greatest living authors’ (Guardian).

Memories of My Family

Three Brothers

An intimate record of rural family life from ‘China’s most controversial novelist’ (New Yorker)

Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness, Yan Lianke’s memoir offers a deeply heartfelt account of his family in the 1960s and 70s. Three Brothers is a must read for anyone who wants to understand post-Mao China and a new opportunity to experience more of what this extraordinary author conveys to us with his vivid and poetic style

Yan’s heart remains firmly with the patient and stoic people who scratch a living from the soil, year after year, and for whom family is everything. It is an elegiac tribute to his father’s generation

One of the masters of modern Chinese literature

Yan depicts his provincial relatives with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death... A memoir steeped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving.

The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention – to write is to risk the hand of power

Fierce, funny, painful and playful…a great Chinese writer

Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures

A celebration of the power of one family to hold together int he most punishing of circumstances

In this heartfelt memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his boyhood home in Song County, Henan Province, painting a richly detailed portrait of rural China during the Cultural Revolution 
 
It is a hard but loving childhood. Yan’s family carve out a modest existence, though food is often so scarce they have to find edible bark and clay for sustenance. Working sixteen-hour shifts in a quarry, Yan’s hands become as crooked as twigs, but the satisfaction of hard physical labour and earning money to support his family proves intoxicating. Reading novels is an escape for Yan, and he yearns to become a writer after hearing about a woman who was allowed to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her first novel. 
 
Caught between his obligations as a son and a brother, and his longing for a new life, Yan eventually joins the army. He returns years later to find his father’s health rapidly deteriorating in the face of his desperate efforts to build a traditional tile-roofed house for each of his sons. 
 
Chronicling the extraordinary lives of his father and two uncles, as well as his own, Three Brothers is a celebration of the power of one family to hold together in the most punishing of circumstances. Sharply alive to the cyclical nature of history, and the power of familial guilt, it also shows how the pen can be a route to freedom.

The Day the Sun Died

WINNER OF THE Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World's Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese

A winner of the Kafka Prize and a frequently cited contender for the Nobel, Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures

Yan Lianke, one of the most important literary interpreters of contemporary China, combines shocking satire and sharp imagery to address the moral vacuum at the heart of the country's extraordinary transformation

Yan Lianke's powerful dystopian novel, narrated by a teenage boy, is set during a single night in a remote Chinese village... The underlying political message, that China is sleepwalking to disaster under President Xi Ping, could hardly be plainer... But there is so much colour in the book, as the sleepwalkers act more and more oddly, that politics seems secondary. Poignant and unsettling

Masterful...a brave and unforgettable novel, full of tragic poise and political resonance, masterfully shifting between genres and ways of storytelling, exploring the ways in which history and memory are resurrected, how dark, private desires seep or flood out

A remarkable novel – open, like most good novels, to a variety of interpretations. The events described are incredible; the atmosphere all too believable

This exuberant but sinister fable confirms its author as one of China's most audacious and enigmatic novelists

Yan Lianke hopes to illuminate the darkness that underpins contemporary China, and in the process help readers wake up from what Yan, like Joyce before him, suggests is he nightmare of history

A poetic nightmare...the creepiest book I've read in years... Yan's understated wit runs through these pages like a snake through fallen leaves...a wake-up call about the path we're on

‘One of the masters of modern Chinese literature’ Jung Chang 
 
This gripping dystopia contrasts the reality of life in China today with the sunny optimism of the ‘Chinese dream’. 
 
One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices that something strange is going on. As the residents would usually be settling down for the night, instead they start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere. 
 
Li Niannian watches, mystified. Until he realises the people are dreamwalking, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already gone down. And before too long, as more and more people succumb, in the black of night all hell breaks loose. 
 
Set over the course of one night, The Day the Sun Died pits chaos and darkness against the bright ‘Chinese dream’ promoted by President Xi Jinping. We are thrown into the middle of an increasingly strange and troubling waking nightmare as Li Niannian and his father struggle to save the town, and persuade the beneficent sun to rise again. 
 
Praise for Yan Lianke's books: 
 
‘Nothing short of a masterpiece’ Guardian 
 
‘A hyper-real tour de force, a blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess’ Financial Times 
 
‘Mordant satire from a brave fabulist’ Daily Mail 
 
‘Exuberant and imaginative’ Sunday Times 
 
‘I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth’ New York Times Book Review

The Explosion Chronicles

Multi-prizewinning and internationally bestselling Yan Lianke -- 'one of China's greatest living authors' (Guardian) -- returns with an unforgettable tale of three families competing to convert their small town into a super-metropolis

Charting the transformation of a rural village into a 21st- century megalopolis, it is a boisterously inventive novel that conveys the everyday reality of modern China

As much a parody of communist rule in China as a devastating critique of capitalist excess, power, greed and self-destruction, Yan’s novel is nothing short of a masterpiece

Extraordinary... A provocatively illuminating and perceptive insight into contemporary China

A hyper-real tour de force, a blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess masquerading as absurdist saga

A rip-roaring Swiftian satire from a contemporary Chinese master... Yan Lianke, one of China's most forthright and versatile novelists, enlists extravagant comedy and far-fetched fable to propel his critique of a society where "power and money have colluded to steal people's souls"

An epic tale of miracles, madness, greed and corruption set against the backdrop of runaway urbanization... Even the most majestic of sights in this novel are distractions designed to mask the pervasive moral rot that lies just beneath the surface

In this comic fable of modern China… Yan has absurdist fun with the impact that policy shifts have on cremation, the military, elections, and the town’s efforts to woo American investors… It’s mordant satire from a brave fabulist

China is put under the microscope in this exuberant and imaginative novel about the sudden growth of a town

In an uproarious cavalcade of boom and (Yan hints) bust, the four Kong brothers and their resourceful womenfolk mastermind the ascent of their home town. Explosion becomes China in microcosm... The novel’s farce, fantasy and fun stay just a step or two ahead of China’s gravity-defying truth. Not surprisingly, Yan’s work has been repeatedly banned in China

Both madcap satire and engrossing dynastic epic, as three rival clans compete to turn the idyllic Chinese village of Explosion into a booming megacity

This darkly absurd history trucks freely with the fantastic - the city's airport is built in less than a week - but many of the more brazen events are taken straight from the news... Yan Lianke's burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution

Yan Lianke paints a metaphoric and absurd portrait of contemporary China so obsessed with growth that its moral values have been left by the wayside. Yan Lianke’s poetic prose rewards those who read to the end of this great novel of rare insight

An epic page-turner... Yan's mesmerizing ability to pull readers into this raw, subversive, not completely fictional world will continue to build his international audience. Mo Yan was the first Chinese national to be awarded the Nobel for Literature; Yan might just be next

Yan returns with renewed vigor to the job of lampooning communist orthodoxy, capitalist ambition, and ‘contemporary China's incomprehensible absurdity.’...[The Explosion Chronicles] has the absurdist feel of an Ionesco or Dürrenmatt piece, though without any of the heavy-handed obviousness. Indeed, his satire is careful and crafty ... it can be read as a kind of Swiftian satire... Brilliant

This novel is a thoroughly fantastical satire where absurdity reflects the profound truth... Beautiful and strongly poetic

[Yan Lianke] manipulates irony, absurdity, and the fantastical with ease

This is an epic tale of miracles, madness, greed and corruption set against the backdrop of runaway urbanisation… Explosion is not as unrelentingly dark as The Four Books, but it may be even more politically daring…. In Explosion brightly hued roses may bloom out of season when something good happens, but the vision is closer to a nightmare. Even the most majestic of sights in this novel are distractions designed to mask the pervasive moral rot that lies just beneath the surface

An extraordinary insight into modern China

Brimming with absurdity, intelligence and wit, The Explosion Chronicles considers the high stakes of passion and power, the consequences of corruption and greed, the dynamics of love and hate, as well as the seemingly boundless excesses of capitalist culture.

A blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess

The sweeping mythic style and cartoon-like effects are exhilarating, and...the realities of life in China are sharply conveyed

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2017 
 
With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on a new significance as the rural community grows explosively from a small village to a town to a city to a vast megalopolis. 
 
Behind this rapid expansion are three rival clans linked together by a web of ambition, madness and greed. Together they transform their hometown into a Babylon of modern times -- an unrivalled urban superpower built on lies, sex and thievery. 
 
'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung Chang

The Four Books

One of China's most important novelists tackles the country's great remaining taboo --  the Great Famine, in which at least 45 million died

Arch and playful... [Yan Lianke] deploys offbeat humour, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history... A brave, brilliant novel

It’s a Chinese novel hailed across the planet as a masterpiece, and I’m normally the first to resist such an imposition before I’ve even opened the thing – but for once, the hype doesn’t go far enough... a devastating, brilliant slice of living history

No other writer in today's China has so consistently explored, dissected and mocked the past six and a half decades of Chinese communist rule... it is an extraordinary novel

Stark, powerful and compelling... A privilege

A searing, allegorical view of Chinese society during some of the darkest moments of the Mao era. . . . Yan cements his reputation as one of China's most important—and certainly most fearless—living writers

Yan's new work is vital historical testimony

A biting satire about Chinese re-education camps during the Great Leap Forward that's as haunting as it is eye-opening

One of the masters of modern Chinese literature, Yan Lianke gives all the pleasures one gets from reading. He can extract humour from the bleakest situation. I whole-heartedly recommend this latest book

A rich reading experience and much light shed on this catastrophic period of Chinese history

Woven together, these “texts” reflect the catastrophe of the times and meditate on the meaning of integrity, truth, love and ethics when confronted with horror. It is an extraordinary novel

As a reader, you close the book with a profound sense of how ideology has permeated and changed very sector of collective human life, from trivial daily matters to the great ruptures of history

A powerful satire on ideology, veering between the grotesque and the horrific

I would absolutely recommend this to individual readers and reading groups alike. It’s not an easy read considering the subject matter but it is a very good one.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2016 
 
'One of China's greatest living authors and fiercest satirists' Guardian 
 
In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling labour camp, the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian and Technician - and hundreds just like them - are undergoing Re-education, to restore their revolutionary zeal and credentials. In charge of this process is the Child, who delights in draconian rules, monitoring behaviour and confiscating treasured books. 
 
But when bad weather arrives, followed by the ‘three bitter years’, the intellectuals are abandoned by the regime and left on their own to survive. Divided into four narratives, The Four Books tells the story of the Great Famine, one of China’s most devastating and controversial periods. 
 
WINNER OF THE FRANZ KAFKA PRIZE 2014 
NOMINATED FOR CZECH AWARD MAGNESIA LITERA 2014 
HUA ZHONG WORLD CHINESE LITERATURE PRIZE 2013 
FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013 
WINNER OF THE HUA ZHONG WORLD CHINESE LITERATURE PRIZE 2013 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 2012 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2012 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE 2011 
WINNER OF THE LAO SHE LITERATURE AWARD 2004 
WINNER OF THE LU XUN AWARD 1997

Lenin's Kisses

'One of China's greatest living authors and fiercest satirists' (Guardian) 
 
Winner of the 2014 Franz Kafka Prize

Yan Lianke is one of China’s most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire

Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real, raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and tears... The publication of this magnificent work in English should be an occasion for celebration.

The award-winning novelist Yan Lianke is one of China's most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire

Yan Lianke movingly chronicles the price that Communist China's rush to get rich has exacted from its vulnerable majority

A hugely ambitious political fable ... a great ripping yarn

Yan’s postmodern cartoon of the Communist dream caving to run-amok capitalism is fiendishly clever

Yan, one of China’s most successful writers, is still gaining attention abroad, but this story of a village that decides to buy Lenin’s corpse is Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that “reality and satire are the same”

I read Lenin’s Kisses, a fierce, funny, painful and playful novel by a great Chinese writer; Yan Lianke. It is much more than just a poignant, daring political parody: it is also a subtle study of evil and stupidity, misery and compassion

This is a tale of modern China with all its wonders, marvels and absurdities and ironies roped together, making it a must-read. It’s little wonder that the author has won both China's equivalences of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Lenin's Kisses wickedly satirizes a sycophantic society where money and power are indiscriminately worshiped ... As the traveling circus gains fans across the country, it becomes clear that the officials behind the scenes, not the performers, are the true freaks

Sprawling, sometimes goofy, always seditious novel of modern life in the remotest corner of China . . . Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, and you’re in the approximate territory of Lianke’s latest exercise in épatering the powers that be . . . A satirical masterpiece

The novel's depth lies in its ability to express an unbearable sorrow, even while constantly making the reader laugh out loud ... a truly miraculous novel

Yan Lianke weaves a passionate satire of today's China, a marvellous circus where the one eyed-man is king . . . Brutal. And wickedly funny

Lenin's Kisses shines with both the lyrical flourishes of magical realism and the keenly sharpened knives of great satire. The reader joins the inhabitants of the village of Liven as they confront the great upheavals of 20th Century Chinese history armed with both whimsy and their obsessive determination to prevail. This tale is at once breathtaking and seriously funny. Anyone who wishes to understand the psychic world-view of the modern People's Republic of China must read this fine novel.

Vincent Lam, author of The Headmaster's Wager

With its distinctive language, structure and narrative approach, Lenin's Kisses presents a distictive version of 'rural china' and 'revolutionary China', even while establishing a new literary 'native China'

Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness . . . this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time

A FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 
 
Deep within the Balou mountains lies a small rural town populated by disabled people. Blind, deaf and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven have until now enjoyed a peaceful, mutually supportive life out of sight and mind of the government. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out that year’s crops, a county official dreams up a scheme that will raise money for the district and boost his career. 
 
He convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show, to include Blind Tonghua’s Acute Listening Act and Deafman Ma’s Firecrackers-on-the-Ear. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from an ailing Russia and install it in a splendid mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to this sleepy district. However, as we all know, even the best intentions can go awry.

The Family Plot

Yan Lianke (Author) Yan Lianke is the author of works including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Day the Sun Died. He has been awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award and was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He has received two of China’s most prestigious literary honours, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award. He was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Jeremy Tiang (Translator) Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and International Booker Prize-longlisted literary translator who has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including Yan Lianke's memoir The Women. Originally from Singapore, Tiang now lives in Flushing, Queens.

A son who wants to kill his father. A father who wants to kill his wife. A wife who wants to kill her only son: this eye-popping new novel by one of the world’s great literary satirists is full of surprises and home truths. 
 
In Gaotian Town, Central Plains, China, a family lives in abject poverty. The son dreams of going to America, while his father fantasises about building a new house. His long-suffering mother worries about her only child’s waywardness. 
 
And all of them want to kill each other. 
 
Class tensions run high in the town, from the wealthiest and most envied family in town to the girl working at the beauty parlour who longs to escape and the entrepreneurial grocer whose success has consequences for multiple lives. 
 
Set in a time of turbulent change, The Family Plot reveals the family’s slow descent into murderous chaos in a fable about the price of desperation and desire. With his dark humour, Yan Lianke explores inequality, modernity, domestic strife and the decay of tradition – and how far people will go in the quest for a better life.

Yan Lianke

Carlos Rojas

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, irrepressible quality

One of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures

Picaresque, but with serious matters of faith, love, and political wrangling at its fast-beating heart

Heart Sutra brings clarity to the dynamic and fraught relations between organised religion and the party on a broader scale and does not shy from difficult histories

Prizewinning Yan Lianke returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptation 
 
Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom. 
 
Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her. 
 
** Beautiful edition illustrated throughout with beautiful original papercuts ** 
 
'One of China's greatest living authors' Guardian 
 
'His talent cannot be ignored' New York Times 
 
'China's foremost literary satirist' Financial Times

Yan Lianke

Praise for Heart Sutra

Darkly exhilarating and daring

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, i ...

Darkly exhilarating and daring

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, i ...

Darkly exhilarating and daring

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, i ...

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