-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Journey to the West
by Wu Cheng'en
Before there was The Lord of the Rings, there was China's Monkey King.
The title character, also known as Sun Wukong, is a shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, beloved by fans of the anime Dragon Ball and the video games League of Legends and Black Myth: Wukong. For raiding Heaven's Orchard of Immortal Peaches, the Buddha pins Monkey King beneath a mountain and frees him only five hundred years later, to protect the pious monk Tripitaka on a fourteen-year journey to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras. Accompanied by two other fallen immortals—a rice-loving pig able to fly with its ears and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster—Monkey King undergoes eighty-one trials, doing battle with all manner of dragons, ogres, wizards, and femmes fatales in this rollicking adventure that not only stands as the most popular of China's Four Great Classical Novels but also gave us one of world literature's most memorable superhero's.
"A breezy, action-packed narrative...Rich with imaginative world-building that evokes the best Pixar films...The book is also quite funny...With this new readable version of Monkey King, Western readers will also have plenty of fun." ―San Francisco Chronicle
"A fun, accessible book that will attract readers to a text that may otherwise seem obscure and imposing...The jokes hit every register, from slapstick and toilet humor to dryly delivered drolleries...The literary analog for the gonzo humor is Rabelais and the fight scenes are the stuff of superhero comics. But the comparison that kept coming to mind is with the irreverent, twinkling humor of Looney Tunes cartoons, with Monkey King a cross between Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil...A rollicking work of high buffoonery." —Wall Street Journal
"Exhibit[s] a rollicking exuberance...[It] has long been—and will continue to be—a rewarding and enjoyable reading experience for many people." ―Washington Post
This information about Monkey King was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Wu Cheng'en (c. 1505-1580) was a Ming Dynasty poet about whom little is known, although he is believed to be the author of Journey to the West, which he published anonymously. He lived much of his life as a hermit.
Julia Lovell (editor/translator/introducer) is the translator of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China and the author of Maoism and The Opium War. She is a professor of modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes about China for the Guardian, Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
If you liked Monkey King, try these:
by Wiz Wharton
Published 2025
Set between the last years of the "Chinese Windrush" in 1966 and Hong Kong's Handover to China in 1997, a mysterious inheritance sees a young woman from London uncovering buried secrets in her late mother's homeland in this captivating, wry debut about family, identity, and the price of belonging.
by Jade Chang
Published 2017
A hilarious debut novel about a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had it all, only to lose every last cent - and about the road trip they take across America that binds them back together.
by John Spurling
Published 2015
A novel of fated meetings, grand battles, and riveting drama, and in its seamless fusion of the epic and the intimate, it achieves a truly singular beauty that deserves to be compared to the classic Chinese novels that inspired it.
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
