We often forget to ascribe agency to modern Tibet. Politically, it seems to lie mute in the behemoth shadow of China. Culturally, we encounter it more as the backdrop to journeys of self-discovery than a producer of modern culture in its own right. But the villages of the Tibetan plateau are defiantly cosmopolitan in Ning Ken’s novel, the first by this important Chinese writer to be translated into English. Sardonic and erudite, it’s the only major literary treatment of Sino-Tibetan relations to appear in English in decades.

The author belongs to the generation of such era-defining Chinese novelists as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke, publishing his first fiction in the heady days of reform and opening-up. Decades later, his writing still retains some of the boldness of that period, when it felt as though Chinese writers could say anything.

Not being Tibetan, Ning eases into his setting via the proxy of Wang Mojie, a Han Chinese academic fleeing a messy divorce in Beijing. Wang is weighed down with suppressed memories of Tiananmen Square and masochistic urges that he can’t seem to shake. Accepting a post in a rural schoolhouse outside of Lhasa, he naively dreams that life among the Tibetan herders will offer him a fresh start.

Instead, he meets Ukyi Lhamo, who has no interest in being a tool for someone else’s self-reinvention. Western-educated, half-Han and struggling to connect with her Buddhist faith after an atheist childhood in Beijing, she embodies the contradictions of Tibet today. She’s combative, unpleasant and enormously complicated, one of the most compelling characters that this generation of Chinese writers has ever imagined.

What ensues is a wide-ranging sparring match – intellectual, spiritual and sexual –that sees our protagonists butting heads over everything, from continental philosophy to Buddhist theology. Their debates can drag on, and the author has a habit of ill-advised metafictional digressions. But, thanks in part to Thomas Moran’s able translation, we never lose sight of the emotional bond between Wang Mojie and Ukyi Lhamo, equal parts attraction and revulsion, that powers the story.

For Ning, Tibet is no passive utopia. It’s the uneasy cultural crossroads where globalisation, spirituality and the political traumas of two peoples collide. Now we finally have a novel in English that captures its complexity – and that’s no small gift.