Heart Sutra

Picaresque, but with serious matters of faith, love, and political wrangling at its fast-beating heart

Kirkus (starred review)

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

The Telegraph

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

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

[An] otherworldly novel

Asian Art Newspaper, *Books of the Year*

Darkly exhilarating and daring

New York Times

One of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures

Washington Post

"Understanding the nature of reality is the key to liberation. The wonderfully concise Heart Sutra is considered the essence of the Buddhas' teachings.The author's long experience in teaching Western students at the Dalai Lama's Library of Tibetan Works and Archives makes The Heart Sutra an ideal introduction for Westerners to this important subject."—The Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies