Amy Tan Books

Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughters' memories and feelings

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.

Stunning reissue of an international bestseller, from the author of The Joy Luck Club' and The Bonesetter's Daughter'.

Tells the story of three generations of Chinese women, beginning at the turn of the century

An unbearably moving, intensely passionate, deeply personal account of life as seen through the eyes of one of America’s best-loved novelists.‘When I began writing this history, I let go of my doubts. I trusted the ghosts of my imagination. They showed me the hundred secret senses. And what I wrote is what I discovered about the endurance of love.’So writes Amy Tan at the beginning of this remarkably candid insight into her life. Tan takes us on a journey from her childhood, as a sensitive but intelligent young Chinese-American, ashamed of her parents’ Chinese ways, to the present day and her position as one of the world's best-loved novelists.She describes the daily difficulties of being at once American and Chinese and yet feeling at times like she was truly neither. Most significantly, and heartbreakingly, she tells the history of her the grandmother who committed suicide as the only means of defiance open to her against a husband who ignored her wishes; her remarkable mother, whose first husband had her jailed when she tried to leave him; and the shocking deaths of both her father and husband when Amy was just 14.How this weight of history has brought itself to bear on the adult Amy looms large in her own story. Ghosts, chance and fate have played a part in her life, and ‘The Opposite of Fate’ is an insight into those ancestors, the women who ‘never let me forget why these stories need to be told’.

Struggling to regain her voice and express her true feelings to her husband, ghostwriter Ruth Young discovers that her inability to speak closely parallels the story of her mother LuLing's early life in China, where Ruth finds the famous bonesetter, a woman whose mouth was sealed shut during a suicide attempt.

“The Bonesetter’s Daughter dramatically chronicles the tortured, devoted relationship between LuLing Young and her daughter Ruth. . . . A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters, haunting images, historical complexity, significant contemporary themes, and suspenseful mystery.” –Los Angeles Times “TAN AT HER BEST . . . Rich and hauntingly forlorn . . . The writing is so exacting and unique in its detail.” –San Francisco Chronicle “For Tan, the true keeper of memory is language, and so the novel is layered with stories that have been written down–by mothers for their daughters, passing along secrets that cannot be said out loud but must not be forgotten.” –The New York Times Book Review “AMY TAN [HAS] DONE IT AGAIN. . . . The Bonesetter’s Daughter tells a compelling tale of family relationships; it layers and stirs themes of secrets, ambiguous meanings, cultural complexity and self-identity; and it resonates with metaphor and symbol.” –The Denver Post

A new novel from the internationally bestselling author of 'The Joy Luck Club'.

A sweeping, evocative epic of two women's intertwined fates and their search for identity, which moves from the lavish parlors of Shanghai courtesan houses to the mountains of a remote Chinese village and the fog-shrouded streets of San Francisco Spanning more than forty years and two continents, Amy Tan's newest novel maps the lives of three generations of women connected by blood and history--and the mystery of an evocative painting known as "The Valley of Amazement." Moving from the collapse of China's last imperial dynasty to the rise of the Republic, the growth of lucrative foreign trade and anti-foreign sentiment, and the inner workings of courtesan houses, The Valley of Amazement interweaves the story of Violet, a celebrated Shanghai courtesan on a quest for both love and identity, and her mother, Lucia, an American woman whose search for penance leads them to an unexpected reunion. The Valley of Amazement is a deeply moving narrative of family secrets, legacies and the profound connections between mothers and daughters, reminiscent of the compelling territory Tan so expertly mapped in The Joy Luck Club. With her characteristic wisdom, grace and humour, Tan conjures up a story of inherited trauma, desire and deception, and the power and stubbornness of love.

The best new memoir I've read in a decade is Amy Tan's breath-taking high-wire act of memory and imagination . . . [a] classic of the form . . . A must-read for the ages. Mary Karr