
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
Lilian Shang, a history professor in Maryland, knew that her father, Gary, had been the most important Chinese spy ever caught in the United States. But when she discovers his diary after the death of her parents, its pages reveal the full pain and longing that his double life entailed--and point to a hidden second family that he'd left behind in China.Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of six previous novels, four story collections, three volumes of poetry, and a book of essays. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ha Jin lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
"Powerful. . . . A heartbreaking portrait of a spy torn between two countries." --The Christian Science Monitor
"A startling thriller. . . . A moving family saga. . . . A subtle page-turner. . . . Expertly chronicles the fraught relationship between the U.S. and modern China with plainspoken clarity." --Entertainment Weekly "Deftly explores the parallels between an immigrant's experience and an informant's--the ambivalence, the delusion, the sense of warring loyalties." --The New Yorker