Four Chinese women, four America daughters - can they learn to understand each other?

In 1949 a group of Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives - until their own inner crises reveal how much they've inherited of their mothers' pasts.

'Pure enchantment' Mail on Sunday

'Honest, moving and beautifully courageous' Alice Walker

'An ambitious saga that's impossible to read without wanting to call your Mum' Stylist

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California in 1952, two and a half years after her parents emigrated to the US. Though her parents hoped she would become a neurosurgeon by trade and a concert pianist by hobby, instead she became an administrator of programmes for disabled children and later a reporter and editor. She visited China for the first time in 1987 and found it was just how her mother had said: 'As soon as my feet touched China, I became Chinese.' Amy Tan lives in San Francisco with her husband.