The Hundred Secret Senses

The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. The "wisest and most captivating novel" (Boston Globe) from the author of the bestselling The Valley Of Amazement

"Tan again revisits the rich intersection of Chinese and American female sensibilities (The Joy Luck Club, 1989; The Kitchen God's Wife, 1991), this time layering her trademark home truths on the fragile foundation of an episodic century-old ghost story."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."  Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendour, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. 

"[Readers of] The Hundred Secret Senses... will have the pleasurable sensation of settling down to hear a favourite storyteller tell a brand-new story with reassuring echoes of narratives they have already come to love."  -  Francine Prose, The Washington Post

And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, and hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.