Lily is haunted by memories--of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness. In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). They painted letters...

"Nobel Prize-winning American author Pearl Buck's 1946 novel about a Chinese woman who decides to leave her marriage on her fortieth birthday, choosing a concubine for her landed-class husband and moving on to a life of freedom." *** "Madame Wu, at 40, retires from married life, planning to find a concubine for her husband and become a chief manager of the house of Wu."

"The title character's wry, sad, and insightful inner voice is the star here. Her meditations on grief, death, love, and duty are full of poetry and longing. Perfect for literary-fiction fans, especially those who enjoyed other extraordinary novels about ordinary people." —Library Journal, starred review
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening...

A mid-twentieth-century widow struggles to manage her farm and raise her children while reflecting on the intertwined experiences of her farm wife mother, her missionary aunt, and a Chinese student whose lives were shaped by the Boxer Rebellion. When 84-year-old Hazel goes into a nursing home in 1999, her children arrive to close up her farmhouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, and find relics of a past they can't fully understand. Told in alternating...

"Daughters are the Ang family's curse. In 1948, civil war ravages the Chinese countryside, but in rural Shandong, the wealthy, landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother--abused by the family for failing to birth a boy--finds her own small acts of rebellion in...

Sent into an arranged marriage, Tan Yunxian, forbidden to continue her work as a midwife-in-training as well as see her forever friend Meiling, is ordered to act like proper wife and seeks a way to continue treating women and girls from every level of society in fifteenth-century China. According to Confucius, "an educated woman is a worthless woman," but Tan Yunxian--born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness--is...

Fictionized biography of Tzu-hsi, the last empress of China, who was known as "Old Buddha."