The Bonesetter's Daughter

Liu Young is now in her eighties, and finally beginning to feel the effects of old age. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she begins to write down all that she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Meanwhile her daughter Ruth, with whom she has a prickly relationship, suspects that something is wrong with her mother: she says so many confusing and contradictory things.

Ruth moves in with her ailing mother, and while tending to her discovers the story LuLing wrote of her tumultuous life growing up in a remote mountain village known as Immortal Heart. Like layers of sediment being removed each page unveils a greater mystery: who was Precious Auntie, LuLing's mute nursemaid, whose suicide changed the path of her life?

Set in contemporary San Francisco and pre-war China, 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' is an extraordinary and inspiring excavation of the human spirit. With great warmth and humour, Amy Tan gives us a mesmerising story of a mother and daughter discovering together that what they share in their bones through history and heredity is priceless beyond measure.

”Tan’s writing rolls along effortlessly, like the best-told folklore – it’s simply mesmerising.”
ELLE

”There is something dizzyingly elemental about Tan’s storytelling; it melds the rich simplicities of fairytales with a delicate lyrical style.”
SUNDAY TIMES