One Man’s Bible is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian’s life under the Chinese Communist regime. Daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, and government propaganda turns citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state.

But One Man’s Bible is also a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.