IN THE POND

Ha Jin has been compared to the late Issac Babel for his spare evocation ofordinary lives caught up in the flux of vast social movements. Winner ofthe Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction for his story collection Underthe Red Flag, Ha Jin is a writer of stark power, simple beauty andpoignant irony. His themes of personal honour in the face of politicalrectitude are carried forward here in his first novel, In the Pond, aclose, unsentimental depiction of life in a small factory town; themanoeuvring, posturing, petty jealousies and injustices of an ordinary manwho tangles with the party bosses.