A Free Life: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate
In A Free Life, Ha Jin follows the Wu family — father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao — as they sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and begin a new life in the United States. As Nan takes on a number of menial jobs, eventually operating a restaurant with Pingping, he struggles to adapt to the American way of life and to hold his family together, even as he pines for a woman he loved and lost in his youth. Ha Jin's prodigious talents are in full force as he brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes of the contemporary immigrant experience.
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
Ha Jin. (2007). A Free Life: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Ha Jin. 2007. A Free Life: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Ha Jin, A Free Life: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
MLA Citation (style guide)Ha Jin. A Free Life: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 1 | 1 |
OverDrive Product Record
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/5F7/220/F1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/5F7/220/F1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- formats
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780375425264
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 87368
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 87368
- type: ASIN
- value: B000W966N4
- name: Kindle Book
- id: ebook-kindle
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780375425264
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 87368
- name: OverDrive Read
- id: ebook-overdrive
- identifiers:
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780375424656
- mediaType
- eBook
- primaryCreator
- role: Author
- name: Ha Jin
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- A Free Life
- dateAdded
- 2015-09-29T23:33:00Z
- contentDetails
- href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=148018
- type: text/html
- account:
- name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
- id: 1151
- sortTitle
- Free Life A Novel
- crossRefId
- 148018
- subtitle
- A Novel
- id
- 5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5
- starRating
- 3.8
OverDrive MetaData
- isPublicDomain
- False
- formats
- fileName: AFreeLife_9780375425264_148018
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 685091
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780375425264
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 87368
- rights:
- type: Copying
- value: 0
- type: Printing
- value: 0
- type: Lending
- value: 0
- type: ReadAloud
- value: 0
- type: ExpirationRights
- value: 0
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- onSaleDate: 10/30/2007
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-epub-adobe
- url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-410/0111-1/5F7/220/F1/FreeLifeANovel9780375425264.epub
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: AFreeLife_148018
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 87368
- type: ASIN
- value: B000W966N4
- name: Kindle Book
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-kindle
- onSaleDate: 10/30/2007
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-epub-adobe
- url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-410/0111-1/5F7/220/F1/FreeLifeANovel9780375425264.epub
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: AFreeLife_9780375425264_148018
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780375425264
- type: PublisherCatalogNumber
- value: 87368
- name: OverDrive Read
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-overdrive
- onSaleDate: 10/30/2007
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-epub-adobe
- url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-410/0111-1/5F7/220/F1/FreeLifeANovel9780375425264.epub
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- keywords
- value: Education
- value: family
- value: relationships
- value: 21st century
- value: Friendship
- value: literary fiction
- value: War
- value: Historical
- value: family life
- value: romance
- value: culture
- value: society
- value: contemporary fiction
- value: Fiction
- value: novels
- value: asian american
- value: Journalism
- value: classic
- value: marriage
- value: love
- value: Coming of age
- value: Asian
- value: Short Stories
- value: mystery
- value: Drama
- value: Adoption
- value: Modern
- value: race
- value: Haiti
- value: feminism
- value: indian
- value: Family Saga
- value: Essays
- value: Music
- value: Chick Lit
- value: Social Justice
- value: literature
- value: social
- value: fiction books
- value: school
- value: realistic fiction
- value: asian fiction
- value: gifts for book lovers
- value: book club books
- value: realistic fiction books
- value: books fiction
- creators
- role: Author
- fileAs: Jin, Ha
- bioText: Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Waiting, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award, and War Trash, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize; the story collections The Bridegroom, which won the Asian American Literary Award, Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award; the novels The Crazed and In the Pond; and three books of poetry. His latest novel, A Free Life is his first novel set in the United States. He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.War Trash, The Crazed, The Bridegroom, Waiting, In the Pond, and Ocean of Words are available in paperback from Vintage Books.
- name: Ha Jin
- imprint
- Vintage
- publishDate
- 2007-10-30T00:00:00-04:00
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- A Free Life
- fullDescription
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate
In A Free Life, Ha Jin follows the Wu family — father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao — as they sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and begin a new life in the United States. As Nan takes on a number of menial jobs, eventually operating a restaurant with Pingping, he struggles to adapt to the American way of life and to hold his family together, even as he pines for a woman he loved and lost in his youth. Ha Jin's prodigious talents are in full force as he brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes of the contemporary immigrant experience.
- reviews
- premium: False
- source: Boston Globe
- content:
"Exquisite and resonant...Jin has fashioned a ruminative, capacious, covertly ironic and quietly revealing tale of one family's pursuit of the American Dream." --Los Angeles Times"Striking. . . . Jin's language has ripened into something extraordinary." --The Washington Post Book World"[A Free Life] transforms the genre.... The narrative unfolds on such an intimate, domestic scale...that it takes a while to realize that this is also an epic." --Robert Pinsky, Slate"A leisurely, generous tale....As vast and unbounded as the brave and overwhelming new world it describes."
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
July 23, 2007
Ha Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, had only been writing in English for 12 years when he won the National Book Award for Waiting
in 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an émigré writer’s woodshedding period. It follows the fortunes of Nan Wu, who drops out of a U.S. grad school after the repression of the democracy movement in China, hoping to find his voice as a poet while supporting his wife, Pingping, and son, Taotao. After several years of spartan living, Nan and Pingping save enough to buy a Chinese restaurant in suburban Atlanta, setting up double tensions: between Nan’s literary hopes and his career, and between Nan and Pingping, who, at the novel’s opening, are staying together for the sake of their young boy. While Pingping grows more independent, Nan—amid the dulling minutiae of running a restaurant and worries about mortgage payments, insurance and schooling—slowly snuffs the torch he carries for his first love. That Nan at one point reads Dr. Zhivago
isn’t coincidental: while Ha Jin’s novel lacks Zhivago
’s epic grandeur, his biggest feat may be making the reader wonder whether the trivialities of American life are not, in some ways, as strange and barbaric as the upheavals of revolution.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
Starred review from August 1, 2007
"Crossing over from China to America" describes not only the theme behind this latest work from National Book Awardwinning author Ha ("Waiting") but also his own transition as a storyteller as he breaks away from novels based in China and sets this work in the United States. Keeping to his use of strong male protagonists, Jin opens with Nan Wu, who, with wife Pingping, is reunited for the first time in three years with six-year-old son, Taotao (he's just been flown to the United States from China). Opening in 1989 and spanning nearly a decade, the novel is divided into six parts and multiple brief chapters that follow the Wu family's fierce determination to make a better life for themselves. Though living the "American dream," Jin's characters, as in his other novels, are not without conflict. Nan, for instance, struggles with his passion to become a successful author even as he works to support his family. Transitioning his characters from Chinese immigrants to Chinese Americans, Jin takes his writing to a new level as he skillfully crafts an ambitiously angst-filled yet masterly tale of assimilation overflowing with both heart and culture. Highly recommended for public and academic library fiction and Asian American fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 7/07.]Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CACopyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
Starred review from July 1, 2007
A poet as well as a fiction writer, Ha Jin writes of sacrifice, isolation, and valor with uncommon perception. In his earlier novels, including Waiting (1999), winner of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and War Trash (2002), also a PEN/Faulkner Award winner, he looks back to China, his homeland. In his seventh work of fiction, Ha Jin anatomizes the immigrant experience. Nan Wu, a Chinese graduate student in Boston, drops out after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He would like to abandon his marriage, too, but his sense of duty toward Pingping and their young son is stronger than his desire for passion and the freedom to write poetry. So Nan laboriouslyprogresses from busboy to chef, then purchases a small Chinese restaurant outside Atlanta, Georgia. He and Pingping work hard, live frugally, and strive to understand their baffling new world, including white friends who adopt a Chinese daughter. While Pingping evinces great strength of character, Nan remains deeply conflicted over his longing for art and his commitment to pragmatism until hisruminations on everything fromthe lives of birds to the differences between Chinese and English precipitate a profound liberation. For Nan, a free life is an honest and creative life. Capacious, pointillistic, empathic, and tender, Ha Jinstaleof one immigrant familys odyssey in America affirms humankinds essential mission, to honor life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)
- popularity
- 131
- links
- self:
- href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/5f7220f1-29a7-4851-8bcd-43856a2cf9c5/metadata
- type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
- self:
- id
- 5f7220f1-29a7-4851-8bcd-43856a2cf9c5
- starRating
- 3.8
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/5F7/220/F1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/5F7/220/F1/{5F7220F1-29A7-4851-8BCD-43856A2CF9C5}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- isPublicPerformanceAllowed
- False
- languages
- code: en
- name: English
- subjects
- value: Fiction
- value: Literature
- publishDateText
- 10/30/2007
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780375424656
- mediaType
- eBook
- shortDescription
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate
In A Free Life, Ha Jin follows the Wu family — father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao — as they sever their ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square and begin a new life in the United States. As Nan takes on a number of menial jobs, eventually operating a restaurant with Pingping, he struggles to adapt to the American way of life and to hold his family together, even as he pines for a woman he loved and lost in his youth. Ha Jin's prodigious talents are in full force as he brilliantly brings to life the struggles and successes of the contemporary immigrant experience.
- sortTitle
- Free Life A Novel
- crossRefId
- 148018
- subtitle
- A Novel
- publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- bisacCodes
- code: FIC045000
- description: Fiction / Family Life / General
- code: FIC051000
- description: Fiction / Cultural Heritage
- code: FIC054000
- description: FICTION / Asian American & Pacific Islander
