Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel - Softcover

"Lisa See has written her best book yet. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is achingly beautiful, a marvel of imagination of a real and secret world that has only recently disappeared. It is a story so mesmerizing the pages float away and the story remains clearly before us from beginning to end."--Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings

"I was mesmerized by this wondrous book-the story of a secret civilization of women, who actually lived in China not long ago. . . . Magical, haunting fiction. Beautiful."--Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace

"Only the best novelists can do what Lisa See has done, to bring to life not only a character but an entire culture, and a sensibility so strikingly different from our own. This is an engrossing and completely convincing portrayal of a woman shaped by suffering forced upon her from her earliest years, and of the friendship that helps her to survive."
-Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

"[A] marvelous narrative . . . a timeless portrait of a contentious, full-blooded female friendship."--Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

"An achingly beautiful, understated and absorbing story of love [that] evokes the work of Jane Austen."--Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A triumph on every level, a beautiful, heartbreaking story."--Washington Post Book World

"Both heartbreaking and heartbreakingly lovely . . . immerses the reader in an unimagined world . . . The characters and their surroundings come vibrantly alive."--Denver Post

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, an “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s written a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on the fan and compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together they endure the agony of footbinding and reflect upon their arranged marriages, their loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace in their friendship, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their relationship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a captivating journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. Now in a deluxe paperback edition complete with an expanded Random House Reader’s Circle guide and an exclusive conversation between Lisa See and her mother, fellow writer Carolyn See, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel is, as the Seattle Times says, “a beautifully drawn portrait of female friendship and power.”