A comic adventure novel that takes Buddhist myth, Chinese folklore and the machinery of the modern quest narrative and throws them into the same deranged cart.

Salzman follows Hsun-ching, a young Chinese monk sent in search of a lost Buddhist text, whose pilgrimage eventually carries him from rural China to Hong Kong and the United States. Travelling with him is Colonel Sun, an immortal, irrepressible trickster figure modelled loosely on the Monkey King of Journey to the West.

What begins as a search for sacred knowledge becomes increasingly interested in what happens when belief meets bureaucracy, migration, commerce and cultural dislocation. There's a collision between earnestness and absurdity: religious conviction exists here beside hustlers, factories, border crossings and modern American life without either cancelling the other out. The result is an unusually warm, strange piece of early-1990s fiction—part pilgrimage, part road novel, part philosophical comedy—whose humour comes less from mocking faith than from watching supposedly stable worlds fail to remain stable.

Vintage Contemporaries / Vintage Books, New York, 1992. Paperback. Moderate shelf and handling wear, including rubbing and light creasing to covers, edge wear and some toning/discolouration, particularly toward the upper cover. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Good condition.