Joy Luck Club

For readers of Amy Tan's bestselling novel, The Valley of Amazement, revisit her classic tale of mothers and daughters

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

"Powerful as myth." The Washington Post Book World

"Beautifully written...a jewel of a book." The New York Times Book Review

"Powerful...full of magic...you won't be doing anything of importance until you have finished this book." Los Angeles Times

"Wonderful...a significant lesson in what storytelling has to do with memory and inheritance." San Francisco Chronicle

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen Gods Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning, all New York Times bestsellers. She has published two childrens books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat and a memoir, The Opposite of Fate. She was the co- producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages.

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, typographer, and web designer. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club board of directors, has been named a Forbes Magazine "30 under 30" in art and design as well as an ADC Young Gun and one of Print Magazines "New Visual Artists". She has designed for Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, Tiffany and Co., Penguin Books and many others. She resides primarily in San Francisco, occasionally in Brooklyn.