Lucy Tan Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: What We Were Promised
If you like family drama with social tension: What We Were Promised
If you are most interested in modern Shanghai: What We Were Promised

Lucy Tan grew up in the New Jersey suburbs in a family with deep ties to China. Her mother was a librarian, so books were close at hand early. As an adult, Tan has spent much of her time between New York and Shanghai, and that back-and-forth runs through her work. Her fiction keeps returning to questions of home, class, belonging, and the uneasy feeling of standing inside two worlds at once. She now lives in Seattle, where she writes and works as a bookseller.

Writing seems to have been part of the plan for a long time.

After earning her B.A. from New York University, Tan moved to Shanghai and gave herself two big tasks: get to know the country her parents had left, and see whether she could build a real writing life outside the classroom. She spent two years there with her parents, who were working as American expats, and she supported herself with a string of jobs while writing on the side. She has said that period helped her figure out whether she had the discipline to keep going on her own.

Shanghai gave her material she could not have invented. Tan lived in a luxury serviced apartment, watched the rhythms between wealthy tenants and the workers who kept everything running, and paid close attention to the ways language and class shaped daily life. Just as important, the city helped her form a more personal relationship to China, one that was not filtered only through family stories. That mix of closeness and distance became one of the engines of her fiction.

The book that introduced her to many readers started as something smaller. In her first year in the M.F.A. program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she wrote a short story about housekeepers accused of stealing a bracelet. A professor encouraged her to try the material as a novel, and Tan followed the thread. She later won the 2016 August Derleth Prize at Wisconsin, and What We Were Promised grew out of that workshop beginning.

Place matters to her, maybe almost as much as plot.

In What We Were Promised, a family returns from the United States to a wealthy enclave in Shanghai, only to find that money and comfort do not quiet old regrets. Readers who connect with Tan tend to like the way she writes about family pressure without turning anyone into a simple villain. She is interested in divided loyalties, in the gap between public success and private loneliness, and in the different ways people try to belong. Shanghai is not just a backdrop in the novel. It presses on every choice her characters make. The same curiosity seems to carry into her next book, Tiger's Mouth, which centers on an intense friendship and rivalry between two young men trying to sort out identity, ambition, and class.

Tan has also published short fiction in journals including American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, and Ploughshares, where she won the magazine's 2015 Emerging Writer's Contest. She has received support from Kundiman and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and What We Were Promised was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. These details help sketch the path, but the through line is simpler. Tan keeps returning to people who are trying to build a life while carrying more history than they know what to do with. That feels true of her work so far, and of the one still to come.