Like Pa Chin's earlier novel Family, Cold Nights is a masterpiece both as fiction and as social commentary.First published in 1947, Cold Nights is set in Chungking at the end of World War II. It describes the frustration of incompatible relationships among mother, son, and daughter-in-law as they deteriorate amidst the social weariness and ennui which pervaded China in the 1940s. Victimized by circumstances and by themselves, they are average people seeking average lives; their plight is shared with the rest of humanity and is depicted with compassion tempered with unflinching realism.