Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather - Hardcover

Praise for Gao Xingjian:

'When he writes of his experiences in the real world, Gao transcends cultural barriers. A good story will out in any language, and when Gao is good he is staggeringly so.' Daily Telegraph

'Brilliant and poetic, keen and original... Gao's ambition is to transcend the specifics of time and place, to write a meditation on literature itself and its ability to reveal the raging, brutal, brilliant beast that is mankind itself... [His work] burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling... Unforgettable.' New York Times

From China's first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature comes an exquisite new book of fictions, none of which has ever been published before in English.

A young couple on honeymoon visit a beautiful temple up in the mountains, and spend the day intoxicated by the tranquillity of the setting; a swimmer is paralysed by a sudden cramp and finds himself stranded far out to sea on a cold autumn day; a man reminisces about his beloved grandfather, who used to make his own fishing rods from lengths of crooked bamboo straightened over a fire...

Blending the crisp immediacy of the present moment with the soft afterglow of memory and nostalgia, these stories hum with simplicity and wisdom – and will delight anyone who loved Gao's bestselling novels, Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible.