Recensori in anteprimaHa Jin

An exploration of freedom by some of the world’s most celebrated poets, published for the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps The year 2015 marks the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the conclusion of the Second World War. But around the world, oppressed and imprisoned people are still longing for freedom and asking, “What does it mean to be free?” This collection of poems explores that question. In honor of the anniversary, some of the world’s top contemporary voices—including Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Richard Blanco—have written never-before-published poems on the theme of liberation as it inspires them personally and creatively. The result is an artistic representation of the universal yearning for freedom spanning eighty-two poems, twenty-five countries, and countless stories of oppression, imprisonment, and liberation. This collection demonstrates the power of art to heal and to bring attention to freedom as a universal human right.

Two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner Ha Jin saw his novel War Trash named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In A Map of Betrayal, Professor Lilian Shang knows her father, Gary, was a Chinese spy, but she reels after reading his diaries chronicling his double life. So when she travels to China to meet the family he left behind, Lilian must make peace with a past she knew nothing of. Fiction “Subtle, masterful and bittersweet.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: a riveting tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families. When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father’s diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary, an astonishing chronicle of his journey as a Communist intelligence agent, reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed—and point to a hidden second family that he’d left behind in China. As Lilian follows her father’s trail back into the Chinese provinces, she begins to grasp the extent of his dilemma: he is a man torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country. She sees how his sense of duty distorted his life, and as she starts to understand that Gary too had been betrayed, Lilian finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from endangering yet another generation of Shangs. A stunning portrait of a multinational family and an unflinching inquiry into the meaning of citizenship, patriotism, and home, A Map of Betrayal is a spy novel that only Ha Jin could write.