The Bonesetter's Daughter

Tan excels at locating the small, quotidian details of Californian domesticity and works the fissures and rifts between the generations very well. She can also blend hip, pop psychology with inherited Chinese lore to amusing effect. But the narrative starts to hum with energy and drive as the story is told from LuLing's perspective. The story shifts to a small Chinese village known as Immortal Heart, in the thirties, where LuLing's mother learnt her father's skill with a splint and special dragon bones dug out of a cave called Monkey's Jaw. The quality of the writing takes on the charm and compulsion of a fable as Ruth's grandmother's tragic life unfolds. In turn, Ruth uses what she learns of the maternal line of resilience to retrieve her own writing voice and vision: "These are the women who shaped her life, who are in her bones...They taught her to worry...They wanted her to get rid of the curses." As she recognises what her mother wants to remember, she begins to define what she wants for her own life.--Cherry Smyth

‘Compelling...exotic lands and the past lend themselves to poetry. Tan turns the familiar but harrowing accounts of pre-Communist Chinese women into a romantic and intriguing tale. LuLing is a classic Tan character, a resilient survivor who, like Olivia in The Hundred Secret Senses, betrays someone close to her with dire consequences.' TLS

'A classic...[told with] originality and humour...this is a delicious pagge-turner that keeps you guessing, laughing and crying until the end.' Sunday Express

'She is a dazzling storyteller, equally adroit at negotiating the pitfalls of Ruth's freewheeling partnership with Art and recreating traditional family life in rural China, with its superstition, ritual and social hierarchies. The Bonesetter's Daughter celebrates the importance of family history, in particular the stories shared between mother and daughter, and makes an unobtrusive plea for the right of all human beings, however humble or displaced, to an informed, sensitive and patient hearing.' Literary Review

'Could there be a better model for writers today than Amy Tan? She tells great stories with powerful themes: love, belonging, exile, death, compassion. She moves easily between pathos, comedy and joy. She never shows off – the technique is so perfect it is invisible. She is that rare, enviable creature, a literary novelist who writes bestsellers.
This is great tragic writing, looking at the worst of human experience with a compassionate and understanding eye. I doubt if any writer alive is capable of telling such a story.’ Scotland on Sunday