Book description
A major novel from the internationally bestselling author of 'The Joy
Luck Club', 'The Kitchen God's Wife' and 'The Hundred Secret Senses'.
LuLing Young is in her eighties, and finally beginning to feel the
effects of old age. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she
begins to write down all that she can remember of her life as a girl in
China. Meanwhile, her daughter Ruth, a ghostwriter for authors of
self-help books, is losing the ability to speak up for herself in front
of the man she lives with. LuLing can only look on, helpless: her
prickly relationship with her daughter does not make it easy to discuss
such matters. In turn, Ruth has begun to suspect that something is wrong
with her mother: she says so many confusing and contradictory things.
Ruth decides to move in with her ailing mother, and while tending to
her discovers the story LuLing wrote in Chinese, of her tumultuous life
growing up in a remote mountain village known as Immortal Heart. LuLing
tells of the secrets passed along by her mute nursemaid, Precious
Auntie; of a cave where dragon bones are mined and where Peking Man was
discovered; of the crumbling ravine known as the End of the World, where
Precious Auntie's bones lie, and of the curse that LuLing believes she
released through betrayal. Like layers of sediment being removed, each
page unfolds into an even greater mystery: Who was Precious Auntie,
whose suicide changed the path of LuLing's life?
Set in contemporary San Francisco and pre-war China, 'The Bonesetter's
Daughter' is an excavation of the human spirit. With great warmth and
humour, Amy Tan gives us a mesmerising story of a mother and daughter
discovering together that what they share in their bones through history
and heredity is priceless beyond measure. 'Compelling … exotic lands
and the past lend themselves to poetry. Tan turns the familiar but
harrowing accounts of pre-Communist Chinese women into a romantic and
intriguing tale. LuLing is a classic Tan character, a resilient survivor
who, like Olivia in “The Hundred Secret Senses”, betrays someone close
to her with dire consequences.' TLS
'A classic … [told with] originality and humour … this is a delicious
page-turner that keeps you guessing, laughing and crying until the end.'
Sunday Express Amy Tan is the author of five critically acclaimed,
internationally bestselling novels. Her first novel, 'The Joy Luck
Club', was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book
Critics Circle Award and was a recipient of the Commonwealth Gold Award.
'The Joy Luck Club' was also adapted into a feature film in 1994. Her
subsequent novels are 'The Kitchen God's Wife', 'The Hundred Secret
Senses', and 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' and 'Saving Fish from
Drowning'. She lives in San Francisco and New York.
