Kitchen God's Wife

"Tan is one of the prime storytellers writing fiction today." NEWSWEEK Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events tha led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949. "The kind of novel that can be read and reread with enormous pleasure." CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She graduated from high school in Montreux, Switzerland, and received her master's degree in linguistics from San Jose State University. Tan is the author of The Hundred Secret Senses, The Joy Luck Club, and two books for children, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat. Her work has been translated into twenty languages. She has been married for the past twenty-two years to Lou DeMattei. They live in San Francisco and New York with their cat, Sagwa, and their dog, Mr. Zo.