One Man’s Bible by Gao Xingjian (Author), Mabel Lee (Translator)

About the Book

Moving between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the tentative, limited liberties of the China of the 1990s, ‘One Man’s Bible’ weaves memories of a Beijing boyhood and amorous encounters in Hong Kong with a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the communist regime – where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. A fluid, elegant exploration of memory, This novel is a profound meditation on the essence of writing and exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit – and how that spirit can triumph.

Editorial Reviews

The new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of the international bestseller ‘Soul Mountain’. ‘Unforgettable. “One Man’s Bible” burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling.’- New York Times

‘An absorbing historical primer on the decades of Maoist terror…Both more personal and more political than its predecessor, “Soul Mountain”, “One Man’s Bible” is a Chinese variation on an important global literary theme: the desperate quest by those living under dictatorships of all kinds to escape the crushing forces of totalitarian collectivism.’- TLS

‘Everything a novel should be…Like all good novelists, Gao creates a world, not as a kind of wallpaper or filling but as a place in which the protagonist suffers and sometimes is happy.’- Literary Review

‘Dreamlike, elegant and haunting.’- Boston Globe

About the Author

Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian (‘gow shing-jen’) is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, he earned a degree in French in Beijing and embarked on a life of letters. Choosing exile in 1987, he settled in Paris, where he completed ‘Soul Mountain two years later. In 1992 he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He is a playwright and painter as well as a fiction writer and critic.