Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Joy Luck Club | 1989 |
| The Kitchen God’s Wife | 1991 |
| The Hundred Secret Senses | 1995 |
| The Bonesetter’s Daughter | 2001 |
| Saving Fish from Drowning | 2005 |
| The Valley of Amazement | 2013 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Rules for Virgins | 2011 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| The Moon Lady | 1992 |
| The Chinese Siamese Cat / Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat | 1994 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings | 2003 |
| Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir | 2017 |
| The Backyard Bird Chronicles | 2024 |
About Amy Tan
Amy Tan is an American novelist, born on 19 February 1952 in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. She is best known for her first book, “The Joy Luck Club” (1989), about four Chinese American mother and daughter pairs, which was filmed in 1993. She has since published five further novels, two children’s books, two memoirs and an illustrated book about birds.
Tan was the second of three children of John Tan, an electrical engineer and Baptist minister, and his wife Daisy. When she was fifteen her father and older brother both died of brain tumours within six months of each other, and her mother moved the family to Switzerland, where Tan finished school in Montreux. She took bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and linguistics at San José State University and later worked as a freelance business writer for companies including IBM and AT&T.
She began writing fiction in 1985 and joined a writers’ workshop to develop the stories that became “The Joy Luck Club”, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. The book drew on her discovery that her mother had left three daughters from an earlier marriage in Shanghai. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Tan co-wrote the screenplay for Wayne Wang’s film with Ron Bass.
“The Kitchen God’s Wife” (1991) tells a story close to her mother’s own life in China in the 1930s and 1940s. “The Hundred Secret Senses” turns to the relationship between two sisters, and “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” returns to an immigrant mother and her American-born daughter. Tan later wrote the libretto for an opera based on that novel, first staged in 2008. “Saving Fish from Drowning” and “The Valley of Amazement” followed in 2005 and 2013.
Her picture book “The Chinese Siamese Cat” became the PBS animated series “Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat”. Her non-fiction includes “The Opposite of Fate” and the memoir “Where the Past Begins” (2017). A documentary about her life, “Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir”, was shown in the PBS American Masters series in 2021, and she has received the National Humanities Medal.
Her most recent book is “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” (2024), an illustrated account of her birdwatching. She lives in Sausalito, California.
Photo: Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).