Gao Xingjian

Chinese playwright, novelist and artist Gao Xingjian became a critic of the Communist regime as a young man. He fled Beijing and has lived for many years in France where his first novel, SOUL MOUNTAIN, was first published and became a bestseller, going into five editions.

In 2000 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mabel Lee's English translation of SOUL MOUNTAIN has been a success worldwide.

Gao's new novel ONE MAN'S BIBLE focuses the political horrors of the
twentieth century through the lens of desire and memory.

From China's first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature comes an exquisite new book of fictions, none of which has ever been published before in English.

A young couple on honeymoon visit a beautiful temple up in the mountains, and spend the day intoxicated by the tranquillity of the setting; a swimmer is paralysed by a sudden cramp and finds himself stranded far out to sea on a cold autumn day; a man reminisces about his beloved grandfather, who used to make his own fishing rods from lengths of crooked bamboo straightened over a fire...

Blending the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the soft afterglow of memory and nostalgia, these stories hum with simplicity and wisdom -- and will delight anyone who loved Gao's bestselling novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible.