A Free Life
by
Ha Jin, who left China for the United States in his late twenties, is easily one of my favorite contemporary writers. A Free Life, published in 2007 and his first novel set in America, follows a Chinese poet in graduate school in Boston and his family, as they struggle to make a permanent home for themselves in America after severing ties with China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre. Brave, heartbreaking, honest.
