Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

From China’s first-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for 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.