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  • Published: 1 November 1994
  • ISBN: 9780749399573
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $22.99

The Joy Luck Club




Amy Tan's bestselling classic novel of mothers and daughters.

‘The Joy Luck Club is an ambitious saga that’s impossible to read without wanting to call your Mum’ Stylist

Discover Amy Tan’s moving and poignant tale of immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters.

In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives - until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.

  • Published: 1 November 1994
  • ISBN: 9780749399573
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Amy Tan

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California in 1952, two and a half years after her parents emigrated to the US. Though her parents hoped she would become a neurosurgeon by trade and a concert pianist by hobby, instead she became an administrator of programmes for disabled children and later a reporter and editor. She visited China for the first time in 1987 and found it was just how her mother had said: 'As soon as my feet touched China, I became Chinese.' Amy Tan lives in San Francisco with her husband.

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Praise for The Joy Luck Club

An extremely absorbing novel

A brilliant first novel... Tan writes from the heart, cutting sharp edges with wit, wisdom and a gentle and delicate precision... The novel covers a remarkable spectrum and reveals the private secrets and ghosts that haunt, torment - and comfort. Completely compelling

Time Out

That rare, mesmerizing novel that one always seeks but seldom finds...a pure joy to read

Chicago Tribune

In this deft and original debut, Amy Tan shows that she is both a consummate storyteller and writer whose prose manages to be emotionally charged without a trace of sentimentality

Sunday Times

Pure enchantment

Mail on Sunday

Honest, moving and beautifully courageous

Alice Walker

A brilliant first novel... Tan writes from the heart, cutting sharp edges with wit, wisdom and a gentle and delicate precision... The novel covers a remarkable spectrum and reveals the private secrets and ghosts that haunt, torment - and comfort. Completely compelling

Time Out

That rare, mesmerizing novel that one always seeks but seldom finds...a pure joy to read

Chicago Tribune

An extremely absorbing novel

The Joy Luck Club is an ambitious saga that’s impossible to read without wanting to call your mum

Stylist