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Waiting
  • Published: 5 January 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099287599
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $50.00

Waiting

Formats & editions
Hardback
2 Sept 2025
EBook
1 Sept 2010
Paperback
5 Jan 2001
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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.

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.
  • Published: 5 January 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099287599
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $50.00
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About the author

Ha Jin

Ha Jin grew up in mainland China and served in the People’s Liberation Army in his teens for five years. After leaving the army, he worked for three years at a railroad company in a remote northeastern city, Jiamusi, and then went to college in Harbin, majoring in English. He has published in English ten novels, four story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ha Jin is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. Ha Jin’s novel The Woman Back from Moscow was published by Other Press in 2023.
portrait photo of Ha Jin

Also by Ha Jin

The Boat Rocker
Looking for Tank Man
The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty
A Song Everlasting
The Banished Immortal
The Boat Rocker - A Novel
A Map of Betrayal
See all

Praise for Waiting

Beautiful and compelling

Daily Mail

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

Marie Claire

A deliciously comic novel

The Times

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

Daily Mail

A classic folktale...an extraordinary novel

Independent