These six stories by Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian transport the reader to moments where the fragility of love and life, and the haunting power of memory, are beautifully unveiled. In "The Temple," the narrator's acute and mysterious anxiety overshadows the delirious happiness of an outing with his new wife on their honeymoon. In "The Cramp," a man narrowly escapes drowning in the sea, only to find that no one even noticed his absence. In the title story, the narrator attempts to relieve his homesickness only to find that he is lost in a labyrinth of childhood memories.

Everywhere in this collection are powerful psychological portraits of characters whose unarticulated hopes and fears betray the never-ending presence of the past in their present lives.

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, One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing and exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit ? and on how that spirit can triumph.

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One Man's Bible is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Chinese Communist regime. Daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, and government propaganda turns citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state.

But One Man's Bible is also a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.

In 1982 Chinese playwright, novelist and artist Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer, the very disease which had killed his father. For six weeks Gao inhabited a transcendental state of imminent death, treating himself to the finest foods he could afford while spending time reading in an old graveyard in the Beijing suburbs. But a secondary examination revealed there was no cancer – he had won a ‘reprieve from death’ and had been thrown back into the world of the living.

Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing. He travelled first to the ancient forests of central China and from there to the east coast, passing through eight provinces and seven nature reserves, a journey of fifteen thousand kilometres over a period of five months. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is Soul Moutain.

Interwoven into this picaresque journey are myriad stories and countless memorable characters – from venerable Daoist masters and Buddhist monks and nuns to mythical Wild Men; deadly Qichun snakes to farting buses. Conventions are challenged, preconceptions are thwarted and the human condition, with all its foibles and triumphs, is laid bare.