Amy Tan has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 16 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 125 ratings. The most-rated is The Joy Luck Club.
The Joy Luck Club
Summary
Four Chinese women, drawn together by the shadow of their past, meet in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and to "say" stories to each other. Nearly 40 years later, one of the women has died, and her daughter arrives to take her place. However, the daughter never expected to learn of her mother's secret lifelong wish - and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation creates among the women an urgent need to remember the past. What is lost between generations and among friends - and what is salvaged - resonates throughout this novel of friendship among women and the relations between mothers and daughters.
Jacket Illustration ©1989 Gretchen Shields; Copyright ©1989
The Valley of Amazement
Summary
New York Times best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan brings us her latest novel: a sweeping, evocative epic of two women's intertwined fates and their search for identity - from the lavish parlors of Shanghai courtesans to the fog-shrouded mountains of a remote Chinese village Shanghai, 1912. Violet Minturn is the privileged daughter of the American madam of the city's most exclusive courtesan house. But when the Ching dynasty is overturned, Violet is separated from her mother in a cruel act of chicanery and forced to become a "virgin courtesan." Half-Chinese and half-American, Violet grapples with her place in the worlds of East and West - until she is able to merge her two halves, empowering her to become a shrewd courtesan who excels in the business of seduction and illusion, though she still struggles to understand who she is. Back in 1897 San Francisco, Violet's mother, Lucia, chooses a disastrous course as a sixteen-year-old, when her infatuation with a Chinese painter compels her to leave her home for Shanghai. Shocked by her lover's adherence to Chinese traditions, she is unable to change him, despite her unending American ingenuity. Fueled by betrayals, both women refuse to submit to fate and societal expectations, persisting in their quests to recover what was taken from them: respect; a secure future; and, most poignantly, love from their parents, lovers, and children. To reclaim their lives, they take separate journeys - to a backwater hamlet in China, the wealthy environs of the Hudson River Valley, and, ultimately, the unknown areas of their hearts, where they discover what remains after their many failings to love and be loved. Spanning more than forty years and two continents, The Valley of Amazement transports listeners from the collapse of China's last imperial dynasty to the beginning of the Republic and recaptures the lost world of old Shanghai through the inner workings of courtesan houses and the lives of the foreigners living in the International Settlement, both erased by World War II. A deeply evocative narrative of the profound connections between mothers and daughters, imbued with Tan's characteristic insight and humor, The Valley of Amazement conjures a story of inherited trauma, desire and deception, and the power and obstinacy of love.
©2013 Amy Tan (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Kitchen God's Wife
Summary
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than 50 years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose all that has been concealed, when she decides to celebrate the Chinese New Year by unburdening herself of everybody's hidden truths - her own and Winnie's, as well as the dreadful news that Winnie's daughter, Pearl, has been keeping from her mother. So begins a series of comic misunderstandings and heartbreaking realizations about luck, loss, and trust, about the things a mother cannot tell a daughter, the secrets a daughter keeps, and the miraculous resiliency of love.
©1991 Amy Tan (P)2008, 2016 Phoenix Books
Friction
Summary
From number-one New York Times best-selling author Sandra Brown comes a gripping story of family ties and forbidden attraction. Crawford Hunt wants his daughter back. Following the death of his wife four years ago, Crawford, a Texas Ranger, fell into a downward spiral that left him relegated to deskwork and with his five-year-old daughter, Georgia, in the custody of her grandparents. But Crawford has cleaned up his act and met all the court-imposed requirements, and now the fate of his family lies with Judge Holly Spencer. Holly, ambitious and confident, temporarily occupies the bench of her recently deceased mentor. With an election upcoming, she must prove herself worthy of making her judgeship permanent. Every decision is high stakes. Despite Crawford's obvious love for his child and his commitment to being an ideal parent, Holly is wary of his checkered past. Her opinion of him is radically changed when a masked gunman barges into the courtroom during the custody hearing. Crawford reacts instinctually, saving Holly from a bullet. But his heroism soon takes on the taint of recklessness. The cloud over him grows even darker after he uncovers a horrifying truth about the courtroom gunman and realizes that the unknown person behind the shooting remains at large...and a threat. Catching the real culprit becomes a personal fight for Crawford. But pursuing the killer in his customary die-hard fashion will jeopardize his chances of gaining custody of his daughter and further compromise Judge Holly Spencer, who needs protection not only from an assassin but from Crawford himself and the forbidden attraction between them. Friction will keep you on the edge of your seat with breathtaking plot twists and the unforgettable characters that make Sandra Brown one of the world's best-loved authors. It is an extraordinary novel about the powerful ties that bind us to the ones we love and the secrets we keep to protect them.
©2015 Sandra Brown (P)2015 Hachette Audio
The Bonesetter's Daughter
Summary
Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is being unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief. Over the course of one fog-shrouded year, between one season of falling stars and the next, mother and daughter find what they share in their bones through heredity, history, and inexpressible qualities of love.
©2001 Amy Tan (P)2005 Phoenix Audio. All Rights Reserved.
The Hundred Secret Senses
Summary
Amy Tan unfolds a series of family secrets that question the connections between fate, beliefs and hopes, memory and imagination, and the natural gifts of our hundred secret senses. Years after her Chinese half sister assails her with ghost stories set in the mysterious world of Yin, a young woman finds herself in China, looking for a way to reconcile the ghosts of her past with the dreams of her future. Follow her journey, learn the truth about love, and rediscover the natural gift of your hundred secret senses.
©1995 Amy Tan (P)1995, 2014 Dove Audio, Phoenix Books
Saving Fish from Drowning
Summary
Twelve American tourists join an art expedition that begins in the Himalayan foothills of China - dubbed the true Shangri-La - and heads south into the jungles of Burma. But after the mysterious death of their tour leader, the carefully laid plans fall apart, and disharmony breaks out among the pleasure-seekers as they come to discover that the Burma Road is paved with less-than-honorable intentions, questionable food, and tribal curses. Then, on Christmas morning, eleven of the travelers boat across a misty lake for a sunrise cruise - and disappear. Drawing from the current political reality in Burma and woven with pure confabulation, Amy Tan's picaresque novel poses the question: How can we discern what is real and what is fiction, in everything we see? How do we know what to believe? Saving Fish from Drowning finds sly truth in the absurd: a reality TV show called Darwin's Fittest, a repressive regime known as SLORC, two cheroot-smoking twin children hailed as divinities, and a ragtag tribe hiding in the jungle - where the sprites of disaster known as Nats lurk, as do the specters of the fabled Younger White Brother and a British illusionist who was not who he was worshipped to be. With her signature "idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters, haunting images, historical complexity, significant contemporary themes, and suspenseful mystery" (Los Angeles Times), Amy Tan spins a provocative and mesmerizing tale about the mind and the heart of the individual, the actions we choose, the moral questions we might ask ourselves, and above all, the deeply personal answers we seek when happy endings are seemingly impossible.
©2005 Amy Tan (P)2005 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Opposite of Fate
Summary
Delve into the stories from Amy Tan's life that inspired best-selling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement. Amy Tan has touched millions of people with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, The Opposite of Fate offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action - a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.
©2003 Amy Tan (P)2016 Recorded Books
First Words
Summary
Most kids write stories. Only a few of them grow up to be successful authors. But before there was Carrie, there was Johnathan and the Witchs. And before there was Rabbit Angstrom, Toyota Dealer, there was Manuel Cirarro, famous detective. Could we have seen the seeds of success in Stephen King's and John Updike's juvenilia? Here is a funny and surprisingly informative gathering of childhood creations by today's most celebrated writers - those who are amused by and happy to share their own early efforts. These young writers are the same people who now dominate the best seller lists and occupy the most celebrate spots on bookshelves in our stores, libraries and homes. Authors include Margaret Atwood, Roy Blount Jr., Pat Conroy, Gail Godwin, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, Amy Tan, John Updike, Gore Vidal, and Paul Mandelbaum (editor).
©2009 Phoenix (P)2009 Phoenix
Selected Shorts: American Classics
Summary
A compilation of classic tales by great American writers performed by terrific actors, with a lineup including Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and PEN Award winners. Amy Tan's "Rules of the Game", performed by Freda Foh Shen. A strict Chinese mother bedevils her chess prodigy daughter. Donald Barthelme's "Game", performed by David Strathairn. Playing cosmic chicken in a nuclear bunker. Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O.", performed by Stockard Channing. Hilarious story of an independent young woman striking out on her own. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" performed by René Auberjonois. Terrifyingly delicious Poe masterpiece. Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" performed by Christine Baranski. Sly, creepy tale of a teenage girl’s seduction by a dangerous drifter. John Sayles' "At the Anarchists’ Convention", performed by Jerry Stiller. Laugh-out-loud classic. Alice Walker's "Everyday Use", performed by Carmen de Lavallade. Siblings disagree about a precious piece of their family heritage. John Cheever's "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor", performed by Malachy McCourt. A high-rise elevator operator is overwhelmed by his riders’ holiday generosity.
©2010 Symphony Space (P)2010 Symphony Space