A boy from the central Tibetan grasslands grows up in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Love, loss, bears, bandits and Buddhist mysteries. Tibet's bestselling author published in English for the first time.

The land is vast, its people few. Ringed by snow-bright peaks, the Changtang Plateau sits at the heart of Tibet. Its inhabitants, like seven-year-old Gongzha and his family, live as centuries of their ancestors have done – hunting and herding, sheltered only by their black yak-hair tents. But it is 1967 and the Cultural Revolution is devouring China. The new order has no time for the old ways – not even the roof of the world will be spared.

As the Red Guard systematically loot and destroy Tibet's monasteries, Gongzha helps hide two treasures belonging to his local temple: an ebony-black medicine Buddha and a gold-inscribed scroll of The Epic of King Gesar. The repercussions of his act will echo across the decades. With his way of life under siege, Gongzha will be taken far from home, to mountain crests and subterranean labyrinths.

He will lose love, he will find it. He will confront man, beast and his own nature as he struggles to find his way in a changing world. Set amid the desolate beauty of Tibet's heartlands, Love in No Man's Land is an epic story of family, identity and endurance, of a way of life imperilled, of a people trying to find their place as the world changes around them.