Product Description

A Best Book of the Year

From the award-winning author of and a riveting tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countriesChina and the United Statesand two families.

When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her fathers 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 entailedand point to a hidden second family that hed left behind in China. As Lilian follows her fathers 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, is a spy novel that only Ha Jin could write.