Heart Sutra

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 *

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 Étranger. 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.