In The Pond

Description

Ha Jin has been compared to the late Issac Babel for his spare evocation of ordinary lives caught up in the flux of vast social movements. Winner of the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction for his story collection Under the Red Flag, Ha Jin is a writer of stark power, simple beauty and poignant irony. His themes of personal honour in the face of political rectitude are carried forward here in his first novel, In the Pond, a close, unsentimental depiction of life in a small factory town; the manoeuvring, posturing, petty jealousies and injustices of an ordinary man who tangles with the party bosses.

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

Though art and politics figure in the action, In the Pond is first and foremost a comedy - naughty, lusty, raucously entertaining. Ha Jin's language echoes working-class Chinese at its rough, bawdy best * New York Times Book Review * Fascinating...spare and taut... A fable about morality and power * Chicago Tribune * Ha Jin captures the particularities of life in China, yet we recognise his characters intimately. The 'otherness' of this most foreign nation falls away as one vividly drawn human after another takes flesh on the page * Boston Globe * Fascinating, refreshing and uncommonly subtle: Ha Jin has made China available to a new world and a world of new readers * Kirkus Reviews * A compelling exploration of the terrain that is the human heart... an all too rare reminder of the reasons why someone might feel so strongly about a book * New York Times *