Book description
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 family:
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'. 'Amy Tan is definitely a guru on life, love and
imagination.' Cosmopolitan
'Amy Tan both comforts and surprises us. She gives us romance and
questions it. She gives us home and makes it a lost home. She gives us
China and America, and questions the value of each. All told in an
elegant, humorous language, full of wit and mystery.' Guardian
'Could there be a better model for writers today than Amy Tan? She
tells great stories with powerful themes: love, belonging, exile, death,
compassion. She moves easily between pathos, comedy and joy.' Scotland
on Sunday amy tan is the author of four 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. She lives in San Francisco and New York.
