The Kitchen God's Wife: A Novel

Front Cover
Penguin, Sep 21, 2006 - Fiction - 416 pages
"Remarkable...mesmerizing...compelling.... An entire world unfolds in Tolstoyan tide of event and detail....Give yourself over to the world Ms. Tan creates for you." —The New York Times Book Review

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 terrible 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 that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949. The Kitchen God's Wife is "a beautiful book" (Los Angeles Times) from the bestselling author of novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.
 

Contents

Section 1
ii
Section 2
38
Section 3
61
Section 4
74
Section 5
87
Section 6
110
Section 7
131
Section 8
152
Section 14
254
Section 15
268
Section 16
281
Section 17
299
Section 18
313
Section 19
332
Section 20
347
Section 21
358

Section 9
164
Section 10
177
Section 11
206
Section 12
218
Section 13
236
Section 22
364
Section 23
383
Section 24
397
Section 25
411
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2006)

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, The Valley of Amazement, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a coproducer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

Bibliographic information