Author Guide · Historical Fiction
Books Written by
See is one-eighth Chinese and does not look it, which she has written about for thirty years as the thing that made her a better writer and a permanent outsider in both directions. She started with a family memoir about her great-grandfather, a patriarch of Los Angeles Chinatown, then three crime novels, and then found the subject she has stayed with: the friendships between women in places and periods where those friendships were the only thing they controlled. She researches by going — to a remote Hunan county to find the last writers of a secret women's script, to Jeju to sit with the diving grandmothers.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 books · Historical Fiction · Female Authors · Literary Fiction · Updated September 2026
See on writing women back into a history that did not record them
Quick facts about Lisa See
On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
Her great-great-grandfather worked on the transcontinental railroad; her great-grandfather Fong See became a patriarch of Los Angeles Chinatown and married a white woman at a time when that was illegal in California. See spent five years on interviews and archives to write it.
The book everything else grows out of. Read it and every later novel makes more sense, including why she keeps returning to women who are inside a community and outside it at once.
Flower Net
Chinese investigator Liu Hulan and American attorney David Stark work a case that runs between Beijing and Los Angeles. Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
The Interior
Hulan goes undercover in a rural Chinese factory making toys for an American company. The most angry of the three.
Dragon Bones
The last of the Red Princess mysteries, built around an archaeological site on the Yangtze before the Three Gorges Dam floods it.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Nineteenth-century Hunan. Lily and Snow Flower are paired as laotong, old sames — a formal lifelong bond between two girls — and write to each other in nu shu, the secret women's script, on a folded fan. Footbinding, famine and one misread sentence.
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.
Peony in Love
Seventeenth-century China, and a girl who starves herself to death for love of an opera, then narrates the rest of the novel as a hungry ghost. Her strangest book.
Shanghai Girls
Two sisters, Pearl and May, go from being calendar girls in 1937 Shanghai to arranged marriages and the immigration barracks at Angel Island. Ends on a cliffhanger.
The sisterhood here is the least sentimental thing she has written — two women who love each other and keep doing damage anyway.
Dreams of Joy
The direct sequel to Shanghai Girls: Joy runs to China during the Great Leap Forward and Pearl goes after her. Do not read this one first.
China Dolls
Three young women in San Francisco's Chinese nightclub scene from 1938 through the war, and the betrayal that comes with Pearl Harbor.
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
An Akha girl in a tea-growing village in Yunnan, and the daughter she gives up, raised in California. Pu-erh tea is the thread that eventually connects them.
The Island of Sea Women
Jeju Island, Korea, and the haenyeo — the women who dive without oxygen and run their own matrifocal economy. Two friends across the Japanese occupation, the 1948 massacre and the decades of silence that followed.
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.
Lady Tan's Circle of Women
Fifteenth-century China. Tan Yunxian was a real woman doctor who trained under her grandmother and published a casebook of her patients — all of them women, most of whom no male physician was permitted to examine.
She is working from an actual surviving document here, which gives the book a spine the invented ones do not have.
Daughters of the Sun and Moon
Los Angeles in the 1870s, around the 1871 Chinese Massacre, in which a mob killed eighteen Chinese residents in one night. Her most recent, and her closest return to the ground of On Gold Mountain.
Thirty years after the family memoir she has gone back to the same city and the same community and written the violence the memoir moves past.
Also published
Three early novels written jointly with her mother, the novelist Carolyn See, and John Espey, under the shared pseudonym Monica Highland:
- Lotus Land (1983) — A Los Angeles saga, the first of the three.
- 110 Shanghai Road (1986) — The second collaboration.
- Greetings from Southern California (1988) — The last of them.
Lisa See's Writing Style: Research First, Then the Women
See's method is fieldwork. She goes where her characters go and eats what they eat, and the books are built out of what she finds rather than what she imagined in advance. For Snow Flower she travelled to a remote county in Hunan and was told she was only the second foreigner to have been there, chasing the last living knowledge of nu shu. For The Island of Sea Women she sat with haenyeo divers on Jeju. For Lady Tan she worked from a real fifteenth-century casebook.
The recurring subject is not romance and it is not family in the general sense. It is the specific bond between two women inside a system that gives them almost no power — sworn sisters, laotong, diving collectives, a doctor and her patients — and what happens when that bond is the only thing either of them controls. Her plots almost always turn on a rupture between two women rather than on a man.
She writes plainly and moves fast, which is why the books read as commercial even when the history is heavy. The research is worn lightly: the footbinding sequences in Snow Flower and the 1948 massacre in The Island of Sea Women are unsparing, but she never stops to lecture.
And she keeps returning to being between things. One-eighth Chinese and visibly not, raised inside a Chinese-American family, she has said she will always be outside in both directions — and almost every protagonist she writes is somebody standing at that same edge.
Lisa See Books in Order
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 things must be read in order. Dreams of Joy is a direct sequel to Shanghai Girls and spoils it entirely, so read those two in sequence. And the three Red Princess mysteries — Flower Net, The Interior, Dragon Bones — follow the same two investigators and work best in order. Everything else is standalone.
Where to start with Lisa See
If you have never read her
→ Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Two girls, one secret script and a misunderstanding that lasts a lifetime. It is the book that made her and it is still the best introduction.
If you want the one people press on each other now
→ The Island of Sea Women. The Jeju divers, the occupation and the 1948 massacre — her most substantial book.
If you want the true story underneath everything
→ On Gold Mountain, the memoir about her own family in Los Angeles Chinatown.
If you like a sister story
→ Shanghai Girls, then Dreams of Joy straight after. Do not read the sequel first.
If it is the women's friendships that draw you
→ My books by female authors list has the others that work the same territory.
Frequently asked questions about Lisa See's books
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. If you want 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 often begin instead with her 1995 memoir On Gold Mountain.
What is nu shu, and is it real?
It is real. Nüshu is a syllabic script derived from Chinese characters, used by women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province, with roughly six to seven hundred characters, each standing for a syllable of the local dialect. Women largely shut out of formal literacy wrote it on fans, embroidered it on handkerchiefs and composed narratives in it. It fell out of everyday use in the twentieth century — Yang Huanyi, generally described as the last proficient native writer, died in 2004 — and it is now preserved through a museum and official heritage transmitters.
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 Chinese-American Los Angeles books share history and territory without being a series.
Is Lisa See Chinese?
She is one-eighth Chinese and grew up inside a large Chinese-American family in and around Los Angeles Chinatown; her great-grandfather Fong See was a patriarch of that community. She has written about the gap between how she looks and how she was raised, saying that she does not look at all Chinese but grew up in a very large Chinese-American family, and that being visibly outside in both directions has made her a better and more interesting writer.
Has any of Lisa See's work been filmed?
Yes. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was adapted into a 2011 feature directed by Wayne Wang and released by Fox Searchlight, starring Li Bingbing, Gianna Jun and Hugh Jackman; the film interleaves the novel's nineteenth-century story with a modern one. Her memoir On Gold Mountain was also adapted as an opera and as a museum exhibition. A Korean television series based on The Island of Sea Women was announced in 2022, but its status has not been confirmed since.
“Research is my absolute favorite part of the writing process. I go everywhere my characters go. I eat everything they eat.”
Lisa See, on her own website. If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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