The Valley Of Amazement - Couverture rigide

“Here are strong women struggling to survive all that life has thrown at them, created by a writer skilled at evoking the roil of emotions and made exploits they experience when they follow their hearts.” (New York Times Book Review)

“[A] novel that grabs your soul.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“This utterly engrossing novel is highly recommended to all readers who appreciate an author’s ability to transport them to a new world they will not forget. As a plus, this reviewer sensed the harbinger of a sequel by the last page.” (Library Journal (starred review))

“Tan is a skilled storyteller. . . A satisfyingly complete, expertly paced yarn.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“Tan’s prodigious, sumptuously descriptive, historically grounded, sexually candid, and elaborately plotted novel counters violence, exploitation, betrayal, and tragic cultural divides with beauty, wit, and transcendent friendship between women.” (Booklist (starred review))

“The author of The Joy Luck Club and The Hundred Secret Senses can deliver a sweeping family saga like nobody else.” (Newsday (Fall Preview))

“Amy Tan is one of our blackest-belted scriveners, and this is her masterwork.” (Mary Karr, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Liars' Club, Cherry, and Lit)

Fans of Tan’s previous works (including The Joy Luck Club) will rejoice when they get their hands on this book. (Real Simple)

“[THE VALLEY OF AMAZEMENT is] akin to her earlier work, yet more sophisticated, and a fine reminder that Amy Tan is herself a master of illusion, and one of the best storytellers around.” (NPR)

“It’s been a long eight years since Amy Tan’s last novel, but THE VALLEY OF AMAZEMENT proves that good things--breathtaking things--come to those who wait. [...] It’s wonderful to be back in Amy’s magical and amazing world.” (Lisa See, author of international bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and Shanghai Girls)

From the lavish parlours of Shanghai courtesans to the fog-shrouded mountains of a remote Chinese village—a sweeping, evocative epic of two women’s intertwined fates and their search for identity

Violet is one of the most celebrated courtesans in Shanghai, a beautiful and intelligent woman who has honed her ability to become any man’s fantasy since her start as a “Virgin Courtesan” at the age of twelve. Half-Chinese and half-American, she moves effortlessly between the east and the west. But her talents belie her private struggle to understand who she really is and her search for a home in the world. Abandoned by her mother, Lucia, and uncertain of her father’s identity, Violet’s quest to truly love and be loved will set her on a path fraught with danger and complexity—and the loss of her own daughter. Lucia, a willful and wild American woman who was once herself the proprietress of Shanghai’s most exclusive courtesan house, nurses her own secret wounds, which she first sustained when, as a teenager, she fell in love with a Chinese painter and followed him from San Francisco to Shanghai. Her search for penance and redemption will bring her to a startling reunion with Flora, Violet’s daughter, and will undo all that Violet believed she knew about her mother.

Spanning fifty years and two continents, The Valley of Amazement sweeps the reader along a deeply moving narrative of family secrets, the legacies of traumas, and the profound connections between mothers and daughters, returning readers to the compelling territory Tan so expertly mapped in The Joy Luck Club. With her characteristic wisdom,grace and humour, Tan conjures up a story of the inheritance of love, its mysteries and senses, its illusions and truths.