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