With the same narrative skills and evocative powers that made her first novel The Joy Luck Club a national bestseller Tan now tells the story of Winnie Louie an aging Chinese woman unfolding a life s worth of secrets to her suspicious Americanized daughter. Tan is one of the prime storytellers writing fiction today. NEWSWEEK 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 terible 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 tha led to Winnie s coming to America in 1949. The kind of novel that can be read and reread with enormous pleasure. CHICAGO TRIBUNE