Author Guide · Historical Fiction
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Lisa See began with a 400-page family history that started life as a Christmas letter. On Gold Mountain (1995) told the story of her great-grandfather Fong See, who helped build Los Angeles’ Chinatown, and she left her job as West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly soon after it came out. Three crime novels followed, then Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), about two girls in nineteenth-century Hunan who write to each other in nu shu, a script used only by women. For that book she travelled to a remote part of China where, she was told, she was only the second foreigner ever to visit. Since then she has written about women’s friendships in places and periods that left them little else: Shanghai and Angel Island, the divers of Jeju, a Ming-dynasty woman doctor, and in 2026 the Chinese women of 1870s Los Angeles. This guide covers her 13 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 key books · 1995–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Lisa See has published 13 books under her own name since 1995: a family memoir, three Red Princess mysteries and nine historical novels. The best known are Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Shanghai Girls (2009) and The Island of Sea Women (2019); the newest is Daughters of the Sun and Moon (2026). Start with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan; the list below also shows which two books must be read in order.
Where to Start with Lisa See
If you have never read her
→ Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005) — two girls, a secret script and a lifelong bond.
If you want her most substantial novel
→ The Island of Sea Women (2019) — the women divers of Jeju.
If you want the true family story
→ On Gold Mountain (1995) — the memoir behind the novels.
If you want a sister story
→ Shanghai Girls (2009) — then read Dreams of Joy straight after.
13 Lisa See Books, in Order
On Gold Mountain
The history of her Chinese-American family, centred on her great-grandfather Fong See, who made a fortune as a merchant in Los Angeles, helped found its Chinatown, lived to 100 and married a white woman as well as Chinese wives. It was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book. See later wrote the libretto for an opera based on it (Los Angeles, 2000) and guest-curated an exhibition on it at the Autry Museum, which travelled to the Smithsonian.
Flower Net
The first Red Princess mystery. Chinese investigator Liu Hulan and American federal attorney David Stark work a case that runs between Beijing and Los Angeles. It was nominated for the 1998 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
The Interior
The second Red Princess mystery. Liu Hulan goes undercover in a factory in rural China that makes toys for an American company, while David Stark works the case from the American side.
Dragon Bones
The third and last Red Princess mystery, built around an archaeological site on the Yangtze that is about to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Nineteenth-century Hunan. Lily, now eighty, looks back on her bond with Snow Flower: the two were matched as girls as laotong, “old sames”, and wrote to each other in nu shu, the women’s secret script, on a folded silk fan. Footbinding, marriage, famine and rebellion test the friendship. Wayne Wang filmed it in 2011.
The book that made her name, and it still holds up. What stays with me is that the tragedy turns on a misreading: two women with the only private language available to them, and it is not enough.
— LisannePeony in Love
Seventeenth-century China. A girl obsessed with the opera The Peony Pavilion starves herself to death for love and narrates the rest of the novel as a hungry ghost. The story draws on the real commentary on the opera published by three wives of one man.
Shanghai Girls
The sisters Pearl and May are calendar-girl models in 1937 Shanghai until the Japanese invasion forces them into arranged marriages and out to America, through the immigration station on Angel Island to Los Angeles’ Chinatown. It was a New York Times bestseller and ends on a cliffhanger.
Dreams of Joy
The direct sequel to Shanghai Girls. Pearl’s daughter Joy runs away to Communist China to find her birth father, and Pearl follows her, into the Great Leap Forward and the famine that came with it.
China Dolls
Three young women, Grace, Helen and Ruby, meet in 1938 and dance in San Francisco’s Chinese nightclubs. Their friendship lasts through the Second World War, and through the betrayal that follows Pearl Harbor, when one of them is hiding a Japanese identity.
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Li-yan, a girl from the Akha ethnic minority in a tea-growing village in Yunnan, has a daughter outside marriage and gives her up; the girl is adopted and raised in California. Pu’er tea, and the trade that grows around it, is the thread that eventually connects them.
The Island of Sea Women
Young-sook and Mi-ja are haenyeo, women who dive without breathing equipment off the Korean island of Jeju and support their families. Their friendship runs from the Japanese occupation through the 1948 Jeju uprising and its massacres to the twenty-first century. A Korean television series with IMTV was announced in 2022.
The best-researched of her books and the one I would give to someone who thinks they do not like historical fiction. The 1948 material is genuinely hard to read.
— LisanneLady Tan’s Circle of Women
Fifteenth-century China. Tan Yunxian was a real woman doctor, trained by her grandmother, who treated women that male physicians could not examine and later published a book of her cases. See builds the novel around her and her lifelong friendship with a midwife’s daughter.
Daughters of the Sun and Moon
Los Angeles from 1870. Three Chinese women arrive in the small, violent pueblo: Dove, the bound-footed daughter of a scholar promised to an older merchant; Petal, sold into servitude; and Moon, a doctor’s wife who limps from failed footbinding. Their lives come together after the “Night of Horrors”, the 1871 Chinese Massacre, in which a mob killed at least 18 Chinese residents. Published in June 2026, it was a New York Times bestseller.
In What Order to Read Lisa See
In publication order: On Gold Mountain (1995), Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), Dreams of Joy (2011), China Dolls (2014), The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (2017), The Island of Sea Women (2019), Lady Tan’s Circle of Women (2023) and Daughters of the Sun and Moon (2026).
Two sets must be read in order. Dreams of Joy is the direct sequel to Shanghai Girls and gives away its ending, and the three Red Princess mysteries, Flower Net, The Interior and Dragon Bones, follow the same two investigators. Everything else is standalone.
A reading path
1. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005)
2. Shanghai Girls (2009)
3. Dreams of Joy (2011)
4. The Island of Sea Women (2019)
5. On Gold Mountain (1995)
Everything Else Lisa See Published
Beyond the 13 key books: 4 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
As Monica Highland (with Carolyn See and John Espey)
3
3 books · 1983–1988
- 1983Lotus Landnovel
- 1986110 Shanghai Roadnovel
- 1988Greetings from Southern Californiaearly postcards with commentary
Guidebook
1
1 book · 2003
- 2003Chinatownwalking guide to Los Angeles’ Chinatown
The years · 1955–2026
Quick facts about Lisa See
- Known for
- She is known for historical novels about friendships between women in China, Korea and Chinese America, above all Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which brought the women’s script nu shu to a wide readership.
- 1955
- Born in Paris, France
- 1995
- On Gold Mountain
- Born
- 18 February 1955, Paris, France
- Family
- Daughter of the novelist Carolyn See; great-granddaughter of Fong See of Los Angeles’ Chinatown
- Lives
- Los Angeles, California
- Before fiction
- West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly
- Honours
- National Woman of the Year, Organization of Chinese American Women (2001); History Makers Award, Chinese American Museum (2003)
- Shortlists
- Edgar Award nominee, Best First Novel (1998), for Flower Net
- On screen
- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2011), directed by Wayne Wang
The red mark is 2005: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, the novel that made her name.
How Lisa See Writes: Research First, Then the Women
See builds her novels out of fieldwork and archives. For Snow Flower and the Secret Fan she travelled to the remote area where nu shu was used; for The Island of Sea Women she spent time with haenyeo divers on Jeju; Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is built on a real fifteenth-century book of medical cases; and for Daughters of the Sun and Moon she worked through 1870s court records at the Huntington Library. She has said she is drawn to stories that were lost, forgotten or deliberately covered up.
Her recurring subject is the bond between two or three women inside a system that gives them little power: laotong, sisters, a diving collective, a doctor and a midwife. The plots usually turn on a rupture between the women rather than on a romance. The prose is plain and quick, and the hardest history, from footbinding in Snow Flower to the 1948 killings in The Island of Sea Women, is told through what the characters live through rather than explained.
Many of the books come back to her own family’s territory: Los Angeles’ Chinatown runs from On Gold Mountain through Shanghai Girls to Daughters of the Sun and Moon. For writers who work the same ground, see Authors like Lisa See.
Watch
A conversation with Lisa See on Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
See talks with the novelist Joanne Leedom-Ackerman at the American Writers Museum in June 2023 about Tan Yunxian, the real fifteenth-century woman doctor behind Lady Tan’s Circle of Women.
Frequently asked questions about Lisa See’s books
How many books has Lisa See written?
Thirteen under her own name: the family memoir On Gold Mountain (1995), three Red Princess mysteries and nine historical novels, the latest Daughters of the Sun and Moon (2026). She also wrote a 2003 guidebook to Los Angeles’ Chinatown and, with her mother Carolyn See and John Espey under the pen name Monica Highland, two novels and a book of postcards in the 1980s.
What are Lisa See’s books in order?
On Gold Mountain (1995), Flower Net (1997), The Interior (1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), Dreams of Joy (2011), China Dolls (2014), The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane (2017), The Island of Sea Women (2019), Lady Tan’s Circle of Women (2023) and Daughters of the Sun and Moon (2026).
Where should I start with Lisa See?
Most readers start with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), her breakout and still her best-known book. For a more recent entry point, The Island of Sea Women (2019) and Lady Tan’s Circle of Women (2023) are the usual recommendations. Readers drawn to the real family history behind the fiction can begin with her 1995 memoir On Gold Mountain.
What is Lisa See’s most famous book?
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), the novel about two women bound for life as laotong in nineteenth-century Hunan, which was filmed in 2011.
Are Lisa See’s books connected, and do I need to read them in order?
Most are standalone. Two exceptions: Dreams of Joy (2011) is a direct sequel to Shanghai Girls (2009) and should be read second, and the three Red Princess mysteries, Flower Net, The Interior and Dragon Bones, follow the same investigators and read best in sequence. Her Los Angeles books share history and territory without being a series.
What is nu shu, and is it real?
It is real. Nu shu (nüshu) is a script based on Chinese characters, each standing for a syllable of the local dialect, that was used only by women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province. Women largely shut out of formal education wrote it on fans, embroidered it on handkerchiefs and composed songs and letters in it. It fell out of everyday use in the twentieth century; Yang Huanyi, generally described as the last native writer, died in 2004.
Is Lisa See Chinese?
She is one-eighth Chinese and grew up in a large Chinese-American family in and around Los Angeles’ Chinatown, where her great-grandfather Fong See was a leading merchant. She was born in Paris and is the daughter of the novelist Carolyn See and the anthropologist Richard See.
Has any of Lisa See’s work been filmed?
Yes. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was made into a 2011 film directed by Wayne Wang and released by Fox Searchlight, with Li Bingbing, Gianna Jun and Hugh Jackman; it adds a modern storyline to the novel’s nineteenth-century one. On Gold Mountain became an opera, with her libretto, in 2000. A Korean television series of The Island of Sea Women was announced in 2022, but no release has been confirmed.
Is Lady Tan’s Circle of Women based on a real person?
Yes. Tan Yunxian was a woman doctor in Ming-dynasty China who learned medicine from her grandmother and published a collection of her cases, all of them women. See used that book as the basis of the novel; the friendship with the midwife’s daughter is her own invention around the record.
Is The Island of Sea Women based on true events?
The setting and history are real: the haenyeo divers of Jeju, the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Jeju uprising of 1948 and the killings that followed. Young-sook and Mi-ja are fictional.
What is Daughters of the Sun and Moon about?
Three Chinese women in Los Angeles from 1870, Dove, Petal and Moon, whose lives come together after the 1871 Chinese Massacre, when a mob killed at least 18 Chinese residents. It was published in June 2026 and returns to the city of On Gold Mountain.
Who was Monica Highland?
A pen name shared by Lisa See, her mother Carolyn See and the writer John Espey. Under it they published the novels Lotus Land (1983) and 110 Shanghai Road (1986) and Greetings from Southern California (1988), a book of early postcards.
Footnotes
- Lisa See — Wikipedia
- Lisa See — official site
- About Lisa See — lisasee.com
- Writing her family’s immigration story turned Lisa See from book critic to best-selling author — NBC News, 2017
- Night of Horrors: LA’s Chinese massacre of 1871 brought to the fore in new book — South China Morning Post, 2026
- Lisa See: Lady Tan’s Circle of Women — American Writers Museum, 2023
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.
“I am what they call in our village “one who has not yet died”—a widow, eighty years old.”
— Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005)
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