Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

by Lisa See

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As... (more)

The Good Earth

by Pearl S. Buck

ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP A poignant tale about the life and labors of a Chinese farmer during the sweeping reign of the country¹s last emperor. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: • A concise introduction that gives readers important background information • A chronology of the author's life and work • A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical... (more)

The Joy Luck Club

by Amy Tan

"Brilliant....Each story is a fascinating vignette, and together they they weave the reader through a world where the Moon Lady can grant any wish, where a child, promised in marriage at two and delivered at 12, can, with cunning, free herself; where a rich man's concubine secures her daughter's future by killing herself, and where a woman can live on, knowing she has lost her entire life." WASHINGTON POST BOOK... (more)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

by Dai Sijie, Sijie Dai

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There the two friends meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western... (more)

Wild Swans

Three Daughters of China

by Rowena Cooper, Jung Chang

A new edition of one of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years. The publication of Wild Swans in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the best-selling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two million, it was received with unanimous critical acclaim, and was named the winner of the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year Award.... (more)

The Bonesetter's Daughter

by Amy Tan

““As compelling as Tan’s first bestseller, The Joy Luck Club. . . No one writes about mothers and daughters with more empathy than Amy Tan.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “<An> absorbing tale of the mother-daughter bond . . . this book sing<s> with emotion and insight.” –People Ruth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to... (more)

Shanghai Girls

by Lisa See

In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters... (more)

The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

With the same narrative skills and evocative powers that made her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, a national bestseller, Tan now tells the story of Winnie Louie, an aging Chinese woman unfolding a life's worth of secrets to her suspicious, Americanized daughter.

Peony in Love

by Lisa See

“I finally understand what the poets have written. In spring, moved to passion; in autumn only regret.” For young Peony, betrothed to a suitor she has never met, these lyrics from The Peony Pavilion mirror her own longings. In the garden of the Chen Family Villa, amid the scent of ginger, green tea, and jasmine, a small theatrical troupe is performing scenes from this epic opera, a live spectacle few females have... (more)

Chinese Cinderella

The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

by Adeline Yen Mah

A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s. A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella , Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving... (more)

The Hundred Secret Senses (Vintage Contemporaries)

The Hundred Secret Senses (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Amy Tan

The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's... (more)

The Painted Veil

by W. Somerset Maugham

Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to... (more)

The Art of War

by Sun Tzu

The Art of War is one of the oldest books on military strategy in the world. It is also one of the most famous studies of strategy and has had a huge influence on Eastern and Western military planning, business tactics, and beyond. First translated into a European language in 1782 by French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, and had possibly influenced Napoleon, and even the planning of Operation Desert Storm.... (more)

Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter

Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter

by Adeline Yen Mah

Born in 1937 in a port city a thousand miles north of Shanghai, Adeline Yen Mah was the youngest child of an affluent Chinese family who enjoyed rare privileges during a time of political and cultural upheaval. But wealth and position could not shield Adeline from a childhood of appalling emotional abuse at the hands of a cruel and manipulative Eurasian stepmother. Determined to survive through her enduring faith... (more)

Waiting: A Novel (Vintage International)

Waiting: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Ha Jin

"In Waiting , Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village. Ha Jin profoundly understands the conflict between the individual and society, between the timeless universality of the human heart and constantly shifting politics of the moment. With... (more)

Empress Orchid: Book 1

Empress Orchid

by Anchee Min

From a master of the historical novel, Empress Orchid sweeps readers into the heart of the Forbidden City to tell the fascinating story of a young concubine who becomes China’s last empress. Min introduces the beautiful Tzu Hsi, known as Orchid, and weaves an epic of a country girl who seized power through seduction, murder, and endless intrigue. When China is threatened by enemies, she alone seems capable of... (more)

The Joy Luck Club

Saving Fish from Drowning: A Novel

by Amy Tan

“A rollicking, adventure-filled story . . . packed <with> the human capacity for love.” –USA Today “A superbly executed, good-hearted farce that is part romance and part mystery . . . With Tan’s many talents on display, it’s her idiosyncratic wit and sly observations . . . that make this book pure pleasure.” –San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses... (more)

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

by Iris Chang

In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered--a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written what will surely be the definitive history of this... (more)

Mao's Last Dancer

by Li Cunxin

From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America-and with an American woman. Two years later, through a series of events worthy of the most exciting... (more)

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Browse Subjects: china

Top Books

by Lisa See

by Pearl S. Buck

by Amy Tan

by Dai Sijie, Sijie Dai

Three Daughters of China

by Rowena Cooper, Jung Chang

by Amy Tan

by Lisa See

by Amy Tan

by Lisa See

The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

by Adeline Yen Mah

by Amy Tan

by W. Somerset Maugham

by Sun Tzu

by Adeline Yen Mah

by Ha Jin

by Anchee Min

by Amy Tan

by Iris Chang

by Li Cunxin