Audiobooks by Amy Tan

Revisiting the Depths: Overcoming Fear and Finding Peace: A Journey of Transformation

'... is a work of art... (and) ... compelling read for those drawn to personal growth, environmental concerns, and the spiritual connection with nature.' 'The writing doesn't just tell—it immerses. The narrative layers internal conflict over the serene scenes, ... (and) a thoughtful meditation on life.' — Literary Titan '... a must-read ... Readers will finish this book feeling inspired and with a newfound understanding of the indomitable human spirit.' '... an immersive memoir that transports readers to another time and place. Amy's reflections on her roles as a mother, entrepreneur, and supportive wife add depth to her story, making it relatable to readers from all walks of life.' — Books to Hook Publishing Join Amy Tan on an incredible journey of self-discovery, healing, and transformation. After a terrifying first dive left her full of fear, Amy avoided the ocean for thirty years, despite once loving it deeply. Now, she's ready to face her past fears and reconnect with the sea. Her story unfolds on the beautiful Tioman Island, where she shares her emotional and spiritual growth as she dives back into the ocean. With vivid storytelling and personal insights, Amy talks about how she overcame her fears, found comfort in nature, and rediscovered her true self. Guided by her kind divemaster, Sebastian, and supported by her loving husband, she learns to trust herself and open up to new challenges. Each dive teaches her about resilience, courage, and the importance of trying new things. This memoir is more than just a personal story, it's a tribute to the power of nature and the strength of the human spirit. Amy's journey encourages readers to face their fears, find peace in nature, and begin their journeys of personal growth. Dive into this unforgettable adventure beneath the waves and discover the deep lessons the ocean holds.

AMY TAN, Amy Tan (Author), AMIRAH DENT (Narrator)

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Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan reveals herself in a way she never has before, delving into her childhood, adolescence, family history, beginnings as a writer and professional life to explore the answers to questions of purpose and meaning that we all ask ourselves as we get older. Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal-writing and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction. Interspersed with direct correspondence between the author and her editor, this audiobook will give fans and critics unparalleled insight into the author's process, her thoughts on the literary enterprise, and her singularly warm, intelligent mind.

Amy Tan (Author), Amy Tan, Daniel Halpern (Narrator)

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Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

From New York Times bestselling author Amy Tan, a memoir on her life as a writer, her childhood and the symbiotic relationship between fiction and emotional memory. In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gathers together evidence of all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels. Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia - the real reason behind an I.Q. test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother - and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Written with candour and characteristic humour, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth.

Amy Tan (Author), Amy Tan (Narrator)

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The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

Delve into the stories from Amy Tan's life that inspired bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan has touched millions of readers 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.

Amy Tan (Author), Amy Tan (Narrator)

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The Valley of Amazement

SHANGHAI, 1912. Violet Minturn is the privileged daughter of an American madam at 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 world — she is able to excel in the business of seduction and illusion but privately struggles to understand herself. SAN FRANCISCO, 1897. Violet’s mother, Lucia, chooses a disastrous course when, as a sixteen-year-old, she becomes infatuated with a Chinese painter and follows him to Shanghai. She is shocked by her lover’s adherence to Chinese traditions and is ultimately unable to mold him to her will, leaving her vulnerable and alone in a foreign land. Fueled by betrayal, both women refuse to submit to fate and societal expectations. They fight to recover what was taken from them: respect; a secure future; and, most poignantly, love. To reclaim their lives, they take separate journeys — one to a backwater hamlet in China, and the other to the wealthy environs of the Hudson River Valley. Ultimately, they must travel deep within, to the unknown areas of the heart. 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, recapturing the lost world of old Shanghai through the inner workings of courtesan houses and the lives of foreigners living in the International Settlement. 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.

Amy Tan (Author), Amy Tan, Camy Tang, Joyce Bean, Nancy Wu (Narrator)

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Rules for Virgins

In her startlingly sensual new story, "Rules for Virgins" - the first fiction she has published in six years - beloved bestselling author Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter's Daughter) takes us deep into the illicit world of 1912 Shanghai, where beautiful courtesans mercilessly compete for the patronage of wealthy gentlemen. For the women, the contest is deadly serious, a perilous game of economic survival that, if played well, can set them up for life as mistresses of the rich and prominent. There is no room for error, however: erotic power is hard to achieve and harder to maintain, especially in the loftiest social circles. Enter veteran seducer, Magic Gourd, formerly one of Shanghai's "Top Ten Beauties" and now the advisor and attendant of Violet, an aspiring but inexperienced courtesan. Violet may have the youth and the allure, but Magic Gourd has the cunning and the knowledge without which the younger woman is sure to fail. These ancient tricks of the trade aren't written down, though; to pass them on to her student, Magic Gourd must reach back into her own professional past, bringing her lessons alive with stories and anecdotes from a career spent charming and manipulating men who should have known better but rarely did. The world of sexual intrigue that Tan reveals in "Rules for Virgins" actually existed once, and she spares no detail in recreating it. But this story is more than intriguing (and sometimes shocking) historical literary fiction. Besides inviting us inside a life that few writers but Tan could conjure up, the intimate confessions of Magic Gourd add up to a kind of military manual for the War of the Sexes' female combatants. The wisdom conveyed is ancient, specific, and timeless, exposing the workings of vanity and folly, calculation and desire that define the mysterious human heart.

Amy Tan (Author), Nancy Wu (Narrator)

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The Bonesetter's Daughter

A stunning reissue of a bestselling, classic novel from the author of The Joy Luck Club and The Hundred Secret Senses.LuLing Young is now 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, Any 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.

Amy Tan (Author), Lorelei King, Pik-sen Lim (Narrator)

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Saving Fish from Drowning

A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. 'Don't be scared,' I tell those fishes. 'I am saving you from drowning.' Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes." - Anonymous 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. And 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.

Amy Tan (Author), Amy Tan (Narrator)

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