The Opposite of Fate - Hardcover

'Endearing, insightful and unfailingly good-humoured.' Metro

'Ranges from the truly comical to the deeply moving. A wonderful collage. The story of any life is fascinating and Amy Tan's has the added advantage of being told beautifully.' Big Issue

'Delightful. A literary memory box containing all sorts of tantalising odds and ends. This collage or mosaic of bright shards has an immediacy and freshness of spirit.' Jane Shilling, Telegraph

‘Amy Tan is definitely a guru on life, love and imagination.’ Cosmopolitan

‘Amy Tan both comforts and surprises us. She gives us romance and questions it. She gives us home and makes it a lost home. She gives us China and America, and questions the value of each. All told in an elegant, humorous language, full of wit and mystery.’ Guardian

‘Could there be a better model for writers today than Amy Tan? She tells great stories with powerful themes: love, belonging, exile, death, compassion. She moves easily between pathos, comedy and joy.’ Scotland on Sunday

‘Although the author recalls some painful subjects – a friend’s murder, her mother’s dementia, her own battle with long-undiagnosed Lyme disease – her prose is thoughtful, never maudlin or self-pitying. Tan writes as easily and unpretentiously about herself as about others... An Examined life recalled with wisdom and grace.’ Kirkus Reviews

Unbearably moving, intensely passionate, deeply personal memoir of family, faith, fate and hope from one of our best-loved novelists

Amy Tan's fiction has always been informed by her experiences and her heritage. Now, in this remarkably candid insight into her life Tan turns, for the first time, to non-fiction and takes us on a journey from her childhood, as a sensitive but intelligent young Chinese American, ashamed of her parents' Chinese ways, to the present day and her position as one of the world's best-loved and best-selling novelists.

She talks of beauty and how she was perceived as a teenager in a country where Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate sex symbol. She describes the daily difficulties of being at once American and Chinese and yet feeling at times like she was truly neither. Most significantly, and heartbreakingly, she tells the history of her family: the grandmother who committed suicide as the only means of defiance open to her against a husband who ignored her wishes; her remarkable mother, whose first husband had her jailed when she tried to leave him; and the shocking deaths of both her father and husband when Amy was just 14. How this weight of history has brought itself to bear on the adult Amy looms large in her own story. Ghosts, chance and fate have played a part in her life, and The Opposite of Fate is an insight into those ancestors, the women who 'never let me forget why these stories need to be told.'