The Story of the Stone, Volume 5: The Dreamer Wakes

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The final volume of China's greatest novel. The Jia family's collapse is now complete — the political protections have crumbled, the debts have come due, and the great household that once seemed eternal is being dismantled room by room. Bao-yu, the dreamer at the centre of everything, must decide whether to remain in the wreckage of the world or wake from it entirely. Cao Xueqin's masterwork ends as it began — in a space between dreaming and waking, where the distinction between the two may never have mattered. The conclusion of a novel that spent five volumes asking whether beauty and love are worth the suffering they cause — and answers with the most devastating silence in Chinese literature.