num_pages: 320
description: For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Mannu Wu. But, back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different. Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of wisdom.
language: English
title: Waiting
titlecomplete: Waiting
genres: Asia, Historical Fiction, Historical, Literary Fiction, Novels, Asian Literature, Literature, China, Romance, Fiction
ratings_count: 21902
awards: awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: National Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: Vintage Books