The Crazed

Description

Professor Yang, a respected teacher of literature, has had a stroke and it falls to Jian Wan - who is also engaged to Yang's daughter - to care for him. It initially seems a simple duty until the professor begins to rave, pleading with invisible tormentors and denouncing his family...Are these just manifestations of illness, or is Yang spewing up the truth? In a China convulsed by the Tiananmen uprising, those who listen to the truth are as much at risk as those who speak it. Lyrical and heart-breaking, The Crazed is an incisive portrait of modern Chinese society.

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 for the USA. He is the author of three novels, Waiting - winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2000 PEN/ Faulkner Award - In the Pond, The Crazed, three collections of stories and three volumes of poetry. He lives near Boston and teaches at Boston University.

Expertly done * Daily Mail * A compelling book... [Jin] has a fine sense of the human scale of history and an eye for the absurd * Guardian * [Jin's] new novel...again demonstrates his literary gifts * The Times * A fascinating tale told with skill and eloquence; a truly wonderful read * Publishing News * The Crazed...is a complicated web of human attachments. Like the best realist writers, Ha Jin sneaks emotional power into the plainest declarative sentences * New Yorker *