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Longtemps après l’avoir perdue de vue, une jeune femme écrit à une ancienne amie de classe dont les origines mystérieuses et l’excentricité ont ébloui son enfance. Elle voudrait que Nastenka, cette « Lituanienne » au destin de grand vent, l’aide à affronter les tempêtes qui secouent tardivement son existence rangée.
A la fois menacée et soupçonnée de crimes qui visent étrangement tous les Dubois, son nom de jeune fille, et qui font à l’entreprise familiale une publicité encombrante, elle doit tenir tête à la police, à un mari accablé, à un frère insaisissable, à une fille ingrate, à une enfant qui bouleverse son cœur.
Comment s’arracher au destin banal de sa tribu ? Comment résister au flot des nostalgies, à la hâte du temps, aux vertiges de l’imaginaire, à la tendresse des mots ? Mais qui est Nastenka et finira-t-elle par répondre ?
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Pantheon Books
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American
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280 pages
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.