Author Guide · Literary Fiction
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Amy Tan was working as a freelance business writer when she began writing fiction as a break from it. After three short stories she was offered book deals, and the result, The Joy Luck Club (1989), spent more than 40 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Born in California to parents who had emigrated from China, she has spent most of her career writing about mothers and daughters, about the China her mother left, and about what gets lost between two languages. Her work has been translated into 35 languages. This guide covers her 10 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1989–2024 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Amy Tan’s best-known book is The Joy Luck Club (1989), followed by The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001). Start with The Joy Luck Club; her most recent book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024), is something else entirely.
Where to Start with Amy Tan
If you want her defining book
→ The Joy Luck Club (1989) — four mothers, four daughters, sixteen stories.
If you want one long, immersive novel
→ The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) — a mother’s life in wartime China, told to her daughter.
If you want to know where the stories came from
→ Where the Past Begins (2017) — her memoir of family and writing.
If you want something completely different
→ The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024) — drawings and notes on the birds in her garden.
10 Amy Tan Books, in Order
The Joy Luck Club
Four Chinese immigrant women in San Francisco meet to play mah-jong, and their four American-born daughters try to understand them. The book is built from sixteen interlinked stories, framed by Jing-mei Woo, who takes her late mother’s place at the table and travels to China to meet the half-sisters her mother left behind. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was filmed in 1993.
The Kitchen God’s Wife
Winnie Louie, a widow in California, finally tells her daughter Pearl the story of her life in China: a cruel first marriage to Wen Fu, the war with Japan, and how she escaped to America. Pearl has her own secret, an illness she has not told her mother about. Tan drew much of Winnie’s story from her own mother’s life.
The Hundred Secret Senses
Olivia, a photographer in San Francisco, has spent her life embarrassed by her older Chinese half-sister Kwan, who says she can talk to the dead. Kwan’s stories of a past life in nineteenth-century China come to a head when the two sisters travel to her home village with Olivia’s estranged husband.
The Bonesetter’s Daughter
Ruth Young, a ghostwriter in San Francisco, discovers that her mother LuLing is losing her memory, and reads the account of her childhood in China that LuLing wrote down in Chinese. It tells of Precious Auntie, the bonesetter’s daughter who raised her, and of a village where people dig up “dragon bones”. Tan later wrote the libretto for an opera of the book, staged by San Francisco Opera in 2008.
The Opposite of Fate
Essays on her family, her mother, her sudden fame and her writing, including her long illness with Lyme disease. It includes “Mother Tongue”, her essay on her mother’s English and the different Englishes she grew up with.
Saving Fish from Drowning
Narrated by the ghost of Bibi Chen, a San Francisco art dealer who died before she could lead a group of American friends on a trip through China and Burma. Without her, the tourists blunder from one cultural mistake to the next and disappear into the jungle. It is her most comic book.
Rules for Virgins
A short work first published as an e-book: in Shanghai in 1912, an experienced courtesan teaches a young beginner the rules of the trade. It grew out of the research for her next novel and shares its world.
The Valley of Amazement
Violet Minturn grows up in an elite courtesan house in early-twentieth-century Shanghai run by her American mother, and is forced into the life herself when they are separated. The novel follows Violet and her mother across several decades and two countries, and returns to Tan’s central subject: what mothers and daughters fail to tell each other.
Where the Past Begins
A memoir assembled from letters, family photographs, documents and emails to her editor Daniel Halpern. She writes about her father and brother, who both died when she was a teenager, her difficult relationship with her mother, and how memory feeds her fiction.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles
An illustrated journal of the birds in her garden in Northern California, which she began keeping after taking up nature-journal sketching. It mixes dated notes, observations and her own drawings, and went in at number one on The New York Times bestseller list.
In What Order to Read Amy Tan
None of Tan’s novels continues another, so you can read them in any order. Reading by date still helps: the first four novels return again and again to the same situation, an American daughter and a mother whose life in China she does not know, while the later books move into satire, historical Shanghai and, finally, nonfiction.
Read the novels before the memoirs. The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins explain which parts of the fiction came from her own family, and they land harder once you know the stories they are about.
A reading path
1. The Joy Luck Club (1989)
2. The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991)
3. The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001)
4. The Valley of Amazement (2013)
5. Where the Past Begins (2017)
Everything Else Amy Tan Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 2 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Children’s books
2
2 books · 1992–1994
- 1992The Moon Ladya picture book based on a story from The Joy Luck Club
- 1994The Chinese Siamese Cata picture book, later the basis of the PBS animated series Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat
The years · 1952–2024
Quick facts about Amy Tan
- Known for
- Amy Tan is known for novels about Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters, beginning with the 1989 bestseller The Joy Luck Club.
- 1952
- Born in Oakland, California
- Born
- 19 February 1952, Oakland, California, to parents who emigrated from China
- Before fiction
- Freelance business writer
- Debut
- The Joy Luck Club (1989), more than 40 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list
- Film
- Co-wrote and co-produced The Joy Luck Club (1993), added to the National Film Registry in 2020
- Honours
- National Humanities Medal (2021); American Academy of Arts and Letters (2022)
- Also
- Member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a charity band of writers
- Translated
- Into 35 languages
The red mark is 1989: The Joy Luck Club, her debut and her best-known book.
How Amy Tan Writes: Mothers, Daughters and Two Languages
Tan’s basic situation is a conversation that has not yet happened: an American-born daughter and a mother whose past in China she knows only in fragments. The Joy Luck Club sets it up with eight narrators, The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Bonesetter’s Daughter with a mother’s written or spoken account handed to her daughter. The structure lets each side be wrong about the other.
Language is part of the subject. In her essay “Mother Tongue” she describes how her mother’s English was treated as broken by shop assistants and doctors, and how she chose to write for a reader like her mother. The mothers in her novels speak in a version of that English, and their daughters often miss what they mean.
Much of the material is her own. Her father and older brother both died when she was a teenager, her mother had left daughters behind in China, and that history runs through the novels. Her two memoirs, The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins, set out where the fiction and the family meet.
Frequently asked questions about Amy Tan’s books
How many books has Amy Tan written?
Twelve. The 10 key books on this page, from The Joy Luck Club (1989) to The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024), and two children’s picture books, The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994). She also wrote the libretto for the opera of The Bonesetter’s Daughter.
What are Amy Tan’s books in order?
The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), The Opposite of Fate (2003), Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), Rules for Virgins (2011), The Valley of Amazement (2013), Where the Past Begins (2017) and The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024).
Where should I start with Amy Tan?
With The Joy Luck Club. It is short, it is made of linked stories that can be read one at a time, and it sets out the themes of everything that follows. If you like it, go on to The Kitchen God’s Wife.
What is Amy Tan’s most famous book?
The Joy Luck Club (1989), her first novel. It spent more than 40 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Has The Joy Luck Club been made into a film?
Yes. The film, directed by Wayne Wang, came out in 1993; Tan co-wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bass and co-produced it. It was added to the National Film Registry in 2020. Her picture book The Chinese Siamese Cat became the PBS series Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter became an opera at San Francisco Opera in 2008.
Is The Joy Luck Club based on Amy Tan’s life?
Partly. Like Jing-mei Woo in the novel, Tan is the daughter of a Chinese mother who had left daughters behind in China. The characters and their stories are invented, but Tan has written in her memoirs about how much of her fiction came from her family.
Why has Amy Tan been criticised?
Some Asian American writers, most prominently the playwright Frank Chin, argued that she and Maxine Hong Kingston presented a distorted, exotic picture of Chinese culture for white readers. The 1993 film was also criticised for its harsh portrayal of the Chinese men in the women’s lives.
What awards has Amy Tan won?
Her books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orange Prize. She received the National Humanities Medal for 2021, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022 and was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library in 2024.
Is Amy Tan still alive?
Yes. She was born on 19 February 1952 in Oakland, California, and lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York. Her most recent book is The Backyard Bird Chronicles (2024).
Is there a documentary about Amy Tan?
Yes. Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir, directed by James Redford for PBS American Masters, was broadcast in May 2021. It includes interviews with Tan, Isabel Allende, Kevin Kwan and members of the film’s cast.
Footnotes
- Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir — PBS American Masters
- Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir (video) — PBS
- American Masters: Amy Tan — WXXI
- An evening with Amy Tan — Greenwich Library
- ‘American Masters’ profiles Amy Tan — Chattanooga Times Free Press, 2021
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum.”
— Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989), the opening line
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