The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan, 1989
Historical fiction Contemporary fictionLiterary fiction
Four mothers, four daughters and a mahjong table, where immigrant hopes land on American-born children who cannot quite hear them. A warm, lyrical novel of family and memory, moving between mothers and daughters with tenderness and quiet longing.
Feels like tenderness and longing. About family and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy family stories told through many voices and memories. The narrative shifts among four mothers and four daughters, so keeping all eight women distinct can take some attention.
Why read it
It offers a tender look at how immigrant hopes and American childhoods meet across a mahjong table, and why those conversations are hard to have.
A page from the book
A place at the table, handed down whether or not you asked.
My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan.Tan has said the fictional club was modelled on a real one: her mother belonged to a mahjong circle of immigrant women in Oakland.
Books that feel like this
More by Amy Tan
The Kitchen God's Wife
Amy Tan, 1991
A mother's long-guarded past surfaces in the stories she finally tells her daughter, changing how both see the family.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Joy Luck Club for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy family stories told through many voices and memories. The narrative shifts among four mothers and four daughters, so keeping all eight women distinct can take some attention.
- What is The Joy Luck Club like?
- A warm, lyrical novel of family and memory, moving between mothers and daughters with tenderness and quiet longing. Feels like tenderness and longing. About family and memory.
- What should I read after The Joy Luck Club?
- If you liked The Joy Luck Club, try The Red Tent (Anita Diamant), One Italian Summer (Rebecca Serle) and Without Merit (Colleen Hoover).
A taste of the feed
What it feels like when the world stops holding you up.
I used to feel like i was on the top of the world. Then one day, i noticed that it felt like i was no longer on the top of the world. I was just floating around inside of it. And then eventually, it felt like the world was on top of me.
Without Merit · Colleen Hoover
What a house becomes when no one has been living in it.
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf strewn driveway.
The God of Small Things · Arundhati Roy
Wanting to disappear completely, and to be loved completely, in the same breath.
Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.
Intermezzo · Sally Rooney
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