Waiting
  • Published: 5 January 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099287599
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99

Waiting

Formats & editions
Hardback
2 Sep 2025
EBook
1 Sep 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: $29.99
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About the author

Ha Jin

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 for the USA. He is the author of six novels, including Waiting – winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2000 PEN/ Faulkner Award – In the Pond, The Crazed and his latest, Nanjing Requiem. He has also published four collections of stories and four volumes of poetry. He lives near Boston and teaches at Boston University

Also by Ha Jin

The Boat Rocker
The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty
A Song Everlasting
The Banished Immortal
The Boat Rocker - A Novel
A Map of Betrayal
Nanjing Requiem
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