Soul Mountain is Gao Xingjian’s great wandering novel.

After a serious illness and a false diagnosis, the narrator leaves Beijing and travels through the forests, mountains and remote villages of southern and south-western China, searching for the elusive place called Lingshan — Soul Mountain.

It is a long, shifting meditation on selfhood, landscape, exile, memory, erotic desire, myth and political disillusionment. Gao moves between “I”, “you”, “he” and “she”, dissolving the stable narrator as he goes. A major work of experimental world literature from the first Chinese-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paperback edition published by Harper Perennial in 2004. First published as Lingshan in Taiwan in 1990. Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee. Good used condition with light shelf wear and handling to covers and edges. Good reading copy.