Heart Sutra
Yan Lianke author Carlos Rojas translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Publishing:10th Jul '25
£9.99
This title is due to be published on 10th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£18.99(9781784744663)

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
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* *
ISBN: 9781529925050
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 35mm
Weight: 500g
416 pages