13 Best Lisa See Books

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan follows Lily, a woman in nineteenth‑century rural China, as she looks back on her laotong bond with Snow Flower, the friend who shared footbinding, marriage, and a secret women’s script until misunderstandings threaten their lifelong loyalty.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women reimagines the life of Tan Yunxian, a fifteenth‑century woman born into an elite family who is trained in women’s medicine by her grandmother and, despite marriage rules that confine her, builds a quiet practice treating female patients alongside her midwife friend Meiling.

Shanghai Girls begins in 1937 with sisters Pearl and May, glamorous advertising models in Shanghai, whose father’s debts and the Japanese invasion force them into arranged marriages and a harrowing journey to Los Angeles, where they must rebuild their lives amid prejudice and family secrets.

China Dolls introduces Grace, Helen, and Ruby, three young women from very different backgrounds who meet in 1938 San Francisco and become dancers at a Chinatown nightclub, pursuing showbusiness dreams even as war, internment, and betrayal test their friendship and sense of belonging.

Dreams of Joy continues the story when nineteen‑year‑old Joy, shaken by family revelations, flees Los Angeles in 1957 to find her birth father in Shanghai and embrace communist ideals, while her mother Pearl follows into Mao’s China determined to bring her daughter safely home.

On Gold Mountain tells the one‑hundred‑year story of Lisa See’s Chinese American family, following her great‑grandfather Fong See and his American wife Ticie from Guangdong to California as they build businesses, raise children, and face exclusion, racism, and changing ideas of home.

The Island of Sea Women is set on Jeju Island, where best friends Young‑sook and Mi‑ja join the haenyeo, a matrifocal community of deep‑sea divers, and their bond is tested over decades of Japanese occupation, civil conflict, and personal betrayals that leave scars above and below the water.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane follows Li‑yan, a girl from an isolated Akha tea‑farming village, who breaks from strict tradition when she gives up her baby daughter for adoption, and later becomes a tea entrepreneur while her child grows up in California searching for her roots.

In Flower Net, Chinese inspector Liu Hulan and U.S. attorney David Stark are forced into an uneasy partnership when the sons of an American ambassador and a Chinese tycoon are murdered, drawing them into Beijing’s power circles, human‑smuggling rings, and a dangerous cross‑border conspiracy.

Peony in Love centers on a sheltered young woman in seventeenth‑century China whose obsession with the opera The Peony Pavilion and a secret romance leads to an early death, after which she narrates as a restless spirit shaping the fates of the women who follow her.

Daughters of the Sun and Moon is set in 1870 Los Angeles, where three Chinese women—Dove, Petal, and Moon—arrive with very different pasts and desires, then must survive rising anti‑Chinese hatred, a brutal massacre, and the choices that will bind them together in an unfamiliar city.

In Dragon Bones, Hulan and David, grieving parents whose marriage is under strain, travel to an archaeological dig near the rising Three Gorges Dam to investigate an American’s death, stolen relics, and a shadowy religious group that may turn protest into violence.

The Interior sends Hulan back to her home village and undercover in a factory where young women assemble toys for export, while David represents the foreign company planning a takeover, pitting their loyalties against each other as they probe a worker’s suspicious death.