Reading List

Authors Like Lisa See

For Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Lisa See went looking for nu shu: a script used by women in rural Jiangyong County, in Hunan province, written between sworn sisters and passed on from mother to daughter, which the men around them did not read. She travelled into the remote part of Hunan where it had been used, and many of the novel's details came from that trip. Every book since has been built the same way — footbinding and the women's quarters, the Chinese women of 1930s Shanghai and wartime Los Angeles, the tea farmers of Yunnan, the haenyeo divers of Jeju, a woman physician of the Ming dynasty — and in June 2026 Daughters of the Sun and Moon took her back to Los Angeles, to the three Chinese women who lived through the massacre of 1871. Readers come to her for the research and for the friendships: two women bound to each other inside a history that left them out. The writers below share that ground — China and its diaspora, women's bonds tested across a lifetime, and a real, half-forgotten episode at the centre of the book.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Chinese history · Women's friendship · Research-led fiction · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Lisa See, start with Amy Tan, the closest in subject — Chinese mothers and American daughters. For the nearest single book to Snow Flower, read Gail Tsukiyama's Women of the Silk. Min Jin Lee and Yaa Gyasi carry a historical wound down a family line the way See does. And for the true history underneath her novels, read Jung Chang's Wild Swans.

10 authors like Lisa See

01
Mothers and daughters · Closest match

Amy Tan

American · b. 1952 · Novelist

Tan was born in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. The Joy Luck Club (1989) is sixteen interlocking stories about four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters; The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001) go back into the mothers' lives in China.

The closest match and the obvious starting point. Where See reaches back into Chinese history itself, Tan works the gap between the two countries inside one family — and The Kitchen God's Wife, a mother finally telling her daughter about her life in wartime China, is the book of hers that reads most like See.

— Lisanne
Every book by Amy Tan →
02
Sworn sisters · Closest to Snow Flower

Gail Tsukiyama

American · b. 1957 · Novelist

Tsukiyama was born in San Francisco to a Chinese mother from Hong Kong and a Japanese father from Hawaii. Women of the Silk (1991) follows Pei, a fish farmer's daughter sent to the silk factories of Guangdong, where she takes the hair-combing vow and gives up marriage for the sisterhood of silk workers. The Samurai's Garden is set in a Japanese coastal village during Japan's invasion of China.

Women of the Silk is the single closest book to Snow Flower on this list: girls sent away to work by their families, bound to one another by a formal vow, inside an economy that owns them. Tsukiyama is quieter than See and less driven by plot, but she cares about the same thing — what women give each other when no one else gives them anything.

— Lisanne
03
Four generations · Korea and Japan

Min Jin Lee

Korean-American · b. 1968 · Novelist

Lee was born in Seoul and moved to New York with her family at the age of seven. Pachinko (2017) follows four generations of a Korean family who move to Japan, from a boarding house near Busan in 1910 to the pachinko parlours of the 1980s, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It opens with the line “History has failed us, but no matter.”

The same architecture as See's best books: a long family line carrying a specific historical injustice — here the treatment of Koreans in Japan — with a mother's choices at its heart. Sunja and her sister-in-law Kyunghee could stand beside See's women; read it after Shanghai Girls.

— Lisanne

Every book by Min Jin Lee →

04
The true history · Three generations

Jung Chang

Chinese-British · b. 1952 · Memoirist and historian

Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan, was a Red Guard as a teenager and came to Britain on a scholarship in 1978. Wild Swans (1991) tells the twentieth century through three women — her grandmother, a warlord general's concubine with bound feet; her mother, a Communist official; and herself — and is banned in mainland China. Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), written with Jon Halliday, was criticised by a number of China scholars for its use of sources.

The book that gives every novel on this list its factual weight. See's women live through footbinding, war and revolution; Chang's grandmother and mother actually did. Read Wild Swans after Snow Flower or Dreams of Joy and both books land differently.

— Lisanne
Every book by Jung Chang →
05
The court and the revolution

Anchee Min

Chinese-American · b. 1957 · Novelist and memoirist

Min was born in Shanghai and sent to a collective farm near the East China Sea at seventeen, during the Cultural Revolution; she moved to the United States in 1984. Red Azalea (1994) is her memoir of those years. Her novels include Becoming Madame Mao, Empress Orchid (2004) and The Last Empress (2007) about Empress Dowager Cixi, and Pearl of China (2010), about the young Pearl S. Buck.

Covers both ends of See's range — the imperial women's quarters and the twentieth-century catastrophe — and Min lived through the second. Red Azalea is Mao's China from inside, a decade after the Great Leap Forward that Joy walks into in Dreams of Joy.

— Lisanne
06
The classic · Rural China

Pearl S. Buck

American · b. 1892 · Novelist · Nobel 1938

Buck was raised in China by missionary parents and spent most of her first forty years there. The Good Earth (1931), about the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-lan, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and in 1938 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The book that first brought Chinese village life to Western readers, and the ancestor of everything on this shelf. O-lan — sold as a kitchen slave, silent, carrying the family — is the kind of woman See writes about, though Buck sees her from outside, where See writes from inside the women's rooms.

— Lisanne
07
The foundation

Maxine Hong Kingston

American · b. 1940 · Memoirist and novelist · National Book Award 1981

Kingston was born in Stockton, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. The Woman Warrior (1976) mixes her mother's village stories, family secrets and a Californian girlhood, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award; China Men, about the men of her family who came to America, won the National Book Award in 1981.

Where Chinese-American women's writing starts. The Woman Warrior opens with an aunt the family will not name — the same silences about women's lives that See builds her plots on, and that her own family memoir On Gold Mountain sets out to fill.

— Lisanne
Every book by Maxine Hong Kingston →
08
Forgotten history · Japanese America

Julie Otsuka

American · b. 1962 · Novelist · PEN/Faulkner Award 2012

Otsuka was born in California; her mother, uncle and grandmother were held for three years in the Topaz camp in Utah. When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) follows one family into incarceration; The Buddha in the Attic (2011), about the Japanese “picture brides” who came to San Francisco in the early twentieth century, won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The same instinct as See's — take a piece of Asian-American women's history most readers never learned and give it people — done in a fraction of the pages. The Buddha in the Attic is a chorus of women where See writes a pair of friends, but its brides arrive in the same California as Shanghai Girls and Daughters of the Sun and Moon.

— Lisanne
09
One family, three hundred years

Yaa Gyasi

Ghanaian-American · b. 1989 · Novelist

Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, and grew up in Alabama. Homegoing (2016) follows two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana — one married to a British slaver, one sold into slavery — and then one descendant per chapter down to the present day; it won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the NBCC John Leonard Award for a first book.

A different continent, but the same structure and the same ambition. If what you love in See is watching a historical wound travel down a family line — and two women whose lives split at one decision — Homegoing is the purest version of it.

— Lisanne
Every book by Yaa Gyasi →
10
Family stories · Archival

Janie Chang

Canadian · Novelist

Chang was born in Taiwan and lives in Vancouver. Three Souls (2013) was inspired by her grandmother, who was not allowed to go to university; Dragon Springs Road (2017) is set in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, The Library of Legends (2020) in 1937 China, and The Porcelain Moon (2023) in France in 1918, among the workers of the Chinese Labour Corps. She co-wrote The Phoenix Crown (2024) with Kate Quinn.

Same method as See's — find the forgotten episode, check it, then write people into it — and the same use of family stories as a starting point. A good next read when you have finished See's own back catalogue.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Lisa See

If you have never read around See, start with Amy Tan.

The Joy Luck Club, the book this whole shelf grew out of.

If you loved Snow Flower, read Gail Tsukiyama.

Women of the Silk: sworn sisters inside an economy that owns them.

If you want the history rather than the novel, read Jung Chang.

Wild Swans: three generations of women through a Chinese century, all of it true.

If you loved the family-line structure, read Min Jin Lee.

Pachinko, after Shanghai Girls.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Lisa See

Who should I read if I love Lisa See?

Amy Tan is the closest in subject — Chinese and Chinese-American women, mothers and daughters, and what goes unsaid between them. Gail Tsukiyama's Women of the Silk is the nearest single book to Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Min Jin Lee and Yaa Gyasi share her multi-generational structure, and Jung Chang's Wild Swans is the true history underneath her novels.

What books are like Snow Flower and the Secret Fan?

Gail Tsukiyama's Women of the Silk (1991), about girls in the Guangdong silk factories who take a vow never to marry, is the closest. After that, Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth and, for the real history of footbinding and arranged marriage, Jung Chang's Wild Swans. See's own Peony in Love (2007) returns to the same world of women's writing in seventeenth-century China.

Is nu shu, the women's writing in Snow Flower, real?

Yes. Nu shu was a script used by women in rural Jiangyong County, Hunan province, usually taught by mothers to daughters and used for poems, letters and songs between women, including sworn sisters. Yang Huanyi, the last woman with firsthand experience of it as a living tradition, died in 2004.

What is Lisa See's newest book?

Daughters of the Sun and Moon, published by Scribner in June 2026. It is set in Los Angeles in 1870–71 and follows three Chinese women in the months before the Chinese massacre of 1871, when a mob killed some eighteen Chinese men.

Which authors write about Chinese history like Lisa See?

Anchee Min covers both the imperial court and the Cultural Revolution, the latter from experience. Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth is the classic novel of rural China. Jung Chang's Wild Swans is the essential nonfiction account of the twentieth century, and Janie Chang writes historical novels about China and the Chinese Labour Corps built on family stories.

Is Lisa See similar to Amy Tan?

They overlap but do not do the same thing. Tan writes about the distance between immigrant mothers and American daughters, mostly in the present. See reaches further back into history and builds each novel on a specific researched practice — footbinding, nu shu, the haenyeo divers of Jeju. Read Tan for the family, See for the history.

Footnotes

  1. Lisa See — Wikipedia
  2. Seeing China — Publishers Weekly, July 2005
  3. Daughters of the Sun and Moon — Bookreporter review
  4. Nüshu: resistance of Chinese peasant women — Geneva Graduate Institute
  5. Wild Swans — Wikipedia
  6. Maxine Hong Kingston — Wikipedia
  7. About Julie Otsuka — julieotsuka.com

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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