The Crazed

'Reading [Ha Jin] is almost like falling in love' New Yorker

A compelling book... [Jin] has a fine sense of the human scale of history and an eye for the absurd

[Jin's] new novel...again demonstrates his literary gifts

A fascinating tale told with skill and eloquence; a truly wonderful read

The Crazed...is a complicated web of human attachments. Like the best realist writers, Ha Jin sneaks emotional power into the plainest declarative sentences

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.

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.

In The Pond

The stark and powerful first novel by the prize-winning author of Waiting.

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

Fascinating...spare and taut... A fable about morality and power

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

Fascinating, refreshing and uncommonly subtle: Ha Jin has made China available to a new world and a world of new readers

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

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.

Shao Bin is a factory fitter in a small Chinese town, a poor and unconnected man with a young wife and a small child, but also an accomplished artist and calligrapher. He's worked at the plant for six years, so feels that this time his family will get an appartment in Worker's Park, where his wife won't have to walk two miles to wash their clothes. 
 
But the party controls everything in the town, and again, the apartments go to corrupt officials and their cronies. Outraged, Bin pens a series of political cartoons attacking them, and finds his trouble is only just beginning.

The Bridegroom

The Bridegroom explores the lives of ordinary Chinese as their constricted society begins to open up to the West, from the author of Waiting, confirming Ha Jin's reputation as a master storyteller.

Ha Jin has the kind of effortless command that most writers can only dream about

Ha Jin's eye for detail, his great storytelling talent, suffuse his work and make The Bridegroom a genuine pleasure

Beautifully understated short stories-Some of them are likely to break your heart

The Bridegroom...showcases [Ha Jin's] mastery of craft, the consummate restraint and nearly telegraphic objectivity with which he paints difficult truths

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 for the States. He is a poet and author of two novels, Waiting (which won the US National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999), and In the Pond, and two previous collections of stories, Ocean of Words (which won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1997), and Under the Red Flag.  He lives near Atlanta, where teaches English at Emory University.

This new collection of short stories by the award-winning author of Waiting confirms Ha Jin's reputation as a master storyteller, as well as a master of the miniature. 
 
In The Bridegroom, the twelve stories capture a China in transition, moving from Maoism towards a more open society. For these men and women, starting to feel the influence of the West, the daily dramas of a system that still struggles to control their every move and thought are made all the more painful. As his characters, from an entrepreneur, transformed from black-market criminal to free market hero, to the workers at Cowboy Chicken, to the professor mistaken by the police for a saboteur, continue to struggle against petty injustices and heartbreaks, Ha Jin celebrates their lives and humanity with the understated humour and simplicity that has won him widespread acclaim.

Waiting

The winner of the 1999 US National Book Award for Fiction, a poignant and deliciously funny love story, set in China during and after the Cultural Revolution.

Dreamy and beautifully written... Reading it will take you into a different world altogether

Imagine if Romeo and Juliet had been made to stretch out their passion for 18 years, without consummating their love. Now imagine them in China during the crazy bureaucracy of Mao's Cultural Revolution, unable to talk in private let alone kiss...the insights into Chinese culture and the complexities of human longing are beautiful and compelling

A classic folktale...an extraordinary novel

For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in his traditional home village lives the humble, loyal wife his family chose for him years ago. Every summer, he returns to ask her for a divorce and every summer his compliant wife agrees but then backs out. This time, after eighteen years' waiting, Lin promises it will be different.

Ha Jin

War Trash is the unforgettable story of Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer sent by Mao with a corps of 'volunteers' to help shore up the Communist side in Korea. When the Americans capture Yu, his command of English propels him into the role of unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare that defines the POW camp. Desperate to return to his beloved fiancée and widowed mother, Yu is trapped by both barbed wire and politics...

Ha Jin

Books by Ha Jin

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