Moving between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolutionand the tentative, liberated liberties of the China of the 1990s, ONE MAN’S BIBLE weaves memoires of a Beijing boyhood and amourous encounters in Hong Kong with a fictionalised account of Xingjian’s life under the communist regime – where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state.

A profound meditation on the essence of writing and exile, this book is above all a piercing passionate account of the effects of political oppression on the human spirit – and of how that spirit can triumph.