The Bonesetter's Daughter

The Bonesetter's Daughter is a novel by the American writer Amy Tan, published in 2001 and her fourth book of fiction.

The novel is divided between two stories. In the first, Ruth Young is a Chinese American woman living in San Francisco, working as a ghostwriter for authors of self-help books and struggling to speak up for herself with the man she lives with, while her elderly mother LuLing becomes more forgetful and more difficult to look after. In the second, LuLing's own history is set out: she grew up in a village in China, in a family whose trade gave the book its title, and the manuscript she wrote in Chinese is translated for Ruth at her request. What Ruth learns about her mother's life in China changes how she understands the woman she has spent years trying to manage, and the novel is about the distance between a life as it was lived and as it was passed on.

Tan's novels return repeatedly to the relationship between an American-born daughter and an immigrant mother, and this one draws on her own family's history.