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

About the Author
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Lenin's Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles, The Day the Sun Died and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the prix Femina Etranger. The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World's Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese. He lives and writes in Beijing.

Reviews
Darkly exhilarating and daring * New York Times *
Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters * The Telegraph *
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 -- Lily Meyer * NPR *
One of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures * Washington Post *
Picaresque, but with serious matters of faith, love, and political wrangling at its fast-beating heart * Kirkus (starred review) *
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 -- Bryan Karetnyk * Financial Times *
[An] otherworldly novel * Asian Art Newspaper, *Books of the Year* *



Book Information
ISBN 9781529925050
Author Yan Lianke
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 332g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 130mm * 27mm