The Joy Luck Club (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

TAN, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2000.

Octavo. Full deep brown leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Brown moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 288 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989.

Amy Tan (b. 1952) was born in Oakland, California, to parents who had emigrated from China in the years before the Communist revolution. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister; her mother had left behind a previous husband and three daughters when she fled Shanghai in 1949. These biographical facts — immigration, rupture, the lives her mother had lived before arriving in America, and the difficulty of communicating across the gap between generations and cultures — became the raw material of The Joy Luck Club, which Tan began writing in the late 1980s while working as a business writer and which she initially pursued partly to understand the relationship with her mother that she had long found both essential and impenetrable.

The Joy Luck Club was published in 1989, spent nearly a year on the New York Times bestseller list, and was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The structure is unusual: sixteen stories arranged in four sections and narrated by eight women — four Chinese-born mothers and four American-born daughters — linked by their membership in the Joy Luck Club, a gathering for mahjong, feasting, and the sharing of stories that the mothers first established in San Francisco in 1949. Each woman tells her story, and the stories gradually reveal the weight of what has been carried across the ocean and across the generations, and the persistent failure — and occasional breakthrough — of communication between mothers who survived extraordinary loss in China and daughters who grew up in America without knowing what their mothers survived.

The novel is structured so that the mothers' stories and the daughters' stories illuminate each other across the sections, and the cumulative portrait of intergenerational inheritance — of trauma, resilience, love, and the specific ways in which the unsaid shapes the lives of those who never heard it — is the central achievement of the book. Wayne Wang's 1993 film adaptation, scripted by Tan and Ronald Bass, brought the novel to a still wider audience. Tan has since written several further novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), as well as a memoir and nonfiction collection, but The Joy Luck Club remains her most widely read and most taught work.

Near fine. Some minor loss to cover gilt; some discolouration to upper edge gilt. Otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000552