Amy Tan Books in Order

If you're new to Amy Tan's fiction: The Joy Luck Club → The Kitchen God's Wife → The Hundred Secret Senses
For sweeping mother–daughter epics: The Joy Luck Club → The Bonesetter's Daughter → The Valley of Amazement
If you like memoir and essays: The Opposite of Fate → Where the Past Begins → The Backyard Bird Chronicles
For younger readers or shared reading: The Moon Lady → Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat
If you're curious about her Shanghai courtesan world: Rules for Virgins → The Valley of Amazement

Amy Tan is an American novelist best known for stories that trace the bonds and tensions between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. She grew up in California as the child of Chinese immigrants, listening closely to the dramatic family stories her mother told.

Tan was born on February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California, the second of three children of John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister; her mother had trained as a nurse and medical technician in Shanghai. The family moved through several California cities, and Tan often felt caught between the expectations in her home and the world outside.

When she was fifteen, tragedy reshaped that world. Within a span of months, both her father and her older brother died of brain tumors. Her mother moved Amy and her younger brother to Switzerland, where Amy finished high school at a boarding school in Montreux. During those years she learned more about her mother’s earlier life in China, including a previous marriage and daughters left behind—material that would later run straight into her fiction.

Returning to the United States, Tan studied at several colleges before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and linguistics from San Jose State University. She began doctoral work in linguistics at the University of California but left academia before completing it. Along the way she worked a string of jobs—switchboard operator, bartender, pizza maker, carhop—before building a demanding career as a freelance business writer for large corporations.

In 1985 she took a fiction workshop in the Sierra Nevada that nudged her writing in a new direction. A short story she wrote there, later published as Rules of the Game, drew the attention of a literary agent and eventually grew into part of her first book, The Joy Luck Club. Published in 1989, the novel about four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters in San Francisco became an unexpected bestseller and was later adapted into a 1993 film for which Tan co-wrote the screenplay.

That success allowed her to step away from business writing and focus on storytelling full-time.

Over the next decades she published a string of novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement. Her work often moves between past and present, the United States and China, and the everyday and the ghostly, asking how family history, silence, and migration shape a person’s sense of self. She has also written for younger readers, teaming with illustrator Gretchen Schields on The Moon Lady and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, the latter inspiring an animated television series.

Tan’s nonfiction ranges from the essay collection The Opposite of Fate to the memoir Where the Past Begins, as well as introductions, lectures, and shorter pieces. Her books have been translated into many languages, and honors such as the National Humanities Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters reflect how deeply her stories have resonated with readers.

In the late 1990s Tan was diagnosed with Lyme disease after years of mysterious symptoms, an experience she has described in detail. Lingering complications, including seizures, led her to help start a charitable fund that assists children with Lyme disease who cannot afford treatment. Her health story sits alongside her long-standing interest in how trauma and resilience echo through generations.

Beyond the page, Tan has written the libretto for an opera of The Bonesetter's Daughter, performed as a singer and percussionist with the author band Rock Bottom Remainders, and, more recently, turned her attention to drawing and watching birds in her Bay Area yard—work that grew into The Backyard Bird Chronicles. She lives between California and New York with her husband, attorney Lou DeMattei, and continues to explore the complicated ways people try to understand one another.