Heart Sutra

byYan Lianke, Carlos Rojas (Translator)

Format:

Buy the book from:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive TGJones Waterstones

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

Darkly exhilarating and daring
New York Times

About Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke is the author of works including Dream of Ding Village, The Day the Sun Died, The Four Books, Three Brothers and Hard Like Water. 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 honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award. He was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China.

Learn more

Details