Lisa See is the author of the best-selling Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net, The Interior and Dragon Bones, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles.
Peony is the cherished only child of the first wife of a wealthy Chinese nobleman. Yet she is betrothed to a man she has never met and as her sixteenth birthday approaches, she has spoken to no man other than her father and never ventured outside the cloistered women's quarters of the Chen Family Villa. Though raised to be obedient, Peony has dreams of her own. But when, from behind a screen, Peony catches sight of an elegant, handsome man with hair as black as a cave and is immediately bewitched by him. So begins Peony's journey of love, desire and sorrow as Lisa See's haunting new novel takes readers back to seventeenth-century China and into the heart and soul of an unforgettable heroine.
'A complex period tapestry inscribed with the age-old tragedy of love and death and bordered round with vignettes from Chinese metaphysics, dynastic history and the intimate chamber tales of women's friendship and rivalry ... See is gifted with a lucid, graceful style'
'This is a worthy follow-up to, and in many ways surpasses, Snow Flower ... a beautiful book about love that reads like an edge-of-your-seat thriller you never want to put down or see end'
'A coming-of-age story, a ghost story, a family saga and a work of musical and social history ... Peony's vibrant voice, perfectly pitched between the novel's historical and passionate depths, carries her story beautifully - in life and afterlife'
'For historically accurate, impassioned fiction about China's women, See has few peers'
A powerful love story steeped in the richness and magic of seventeenth-century China by the bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
