Errant Pinkies

Robert Macfarlane

  • Waiting by Ha Jin
    Heinemann, 308 pp, £10.00, May 2000, ISBN 0 434 00914 8

Ha Jin’s Waiting, a love story set in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution, won last year’s US National Book Award for Fiction, and has just received the less munificent, but classier, PEN/Faulkner Award. Dubbed, then, on both shoulders – once by the book-buying public, once by the literati. This is surprising, given that in places the novel is strikingly badly written. Why has it done so well?

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