Multi-prizewinning and internationally acclaimed Yan Lianke -- 'China's most controversial
novelist' (New Yorker) -- returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist
as she journeys through worldly temptation To tell the truth religious faith is really just a
matter of believing stories. The world is governed by stories and it is for the sake of
stories that everyone lives on this earth. 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.
In this profoundly otherworldly novel Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in
typically visionary fashion dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our
own but which reflects our own questions and struggles right back at us. ** 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
