A major novel from the internationally bestselling
author of 'The Joy Luck Club', 'The Kitchen God's Wife'
and 'The Hundred Secret Senses'. LuLing Young is in her
eighties, and finally beginning to feel the effects of
old age. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she
begins to write down all that she can remember of her
life as a girl in China. Meanwhile, her daughter Ruth, a
ghostwriter for authors of self-help books, is losing
the ability to speak up for herself in front of the man
she lives with. LuLing can only look on, helpless: her
prickly relationship with her daughter does not make it
easy to discuss such matters. In turn, Ruth has begun to
suspect that something is wrong with her mother: she
says so many confusing and contradictory things. Ruth
decides to move in with her ailing mother, and while
tending to her discovers the story LuLing wrote in
Chinese, of her tumultuous life growing up in a remote
mountain village known as Immortal Heart.LuLing tells of
the secrets passed along by her mute nursemaid, Precious
Auntie; of a cave where dragon bones are mined and where
Peking Man was discovered; of the crumbling ravine known
as the End of the World, where Precious Auntie's bones
lie, and of the curse that LuLing believes she released
through betrayal. Like layers of sediment being removed,
each page unfolds into an even greater mystery: Who was
Precious Auntie, whose suicide changed the path of
LuLing's life? Set in contemporary San Francisco and
pre-war China, 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' is an
excavation of the human spirit. With great warmth and
humour, Amy Tan gives us a mesmerising story of a mother
and daughter discovering together that what they share
in their bones through history and heredity is priceless
beyond measure. |
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