Amy Tan's First Novel in Eight Years, The Valley of Amazement, to be released in November

Posted on July 1, 2013

Amy Tan, the author of the bestselling The Joy Luck Club, hasn't published a novel in eight years. But her fans are in for a treat as her next book, The Valley of Amazement, will by published by HarperCollin's Ecco imprint in November, 2013. The novel tells the story of three generations of women. The novel moves between three locations: the world of courtesans in turn of the century Shanghai, the streets of 19th century San Francisco and a remote Chinese mountain village. A painting known as "The Valley of Amazement" also ties the stories together.

Ecco announced today that it has also acquired North American rights to Amy's next two books. The first book is a collection of essays that Ecco will release in the fall of 2014. The next book will be another novel called The Memory of Desire which will be released in the Fall of 2016.

Tan discussed why she loves working with Ecco: "Ecco is a dream publisher. I love the old-fashioned nurturing, the editorial care from intent to sentence. And I'm truly excited by the creative and fun ways they're doing publicity and marketing. I have a techy streak and it's a kick being involved with their plans. Naturally, I'm thrilled that we'll be working together on the next two books. In a few months, I'll finish the first, as yet untitled collection of personal essays on writing and the way my mind works - why I write, what I think about, what I wonder over, and the way my imagination gets released. The second book is a novel called The Memory of Desire, about a house in San Francisco and the battle for ownership among three families over the last seventy-five years. The narrator is an octogenarian who has had a stroke and finds she can speak only Chinese, the once-forgotten language of her childhood. She can now recall what she heard long ago, the source of the feud, and the reason her memory of it was removed. It's a story about motives, passion, and inherited desire."

Daniel Halpern, President and Publisher of Ecco, is thrilled that he got to edit her upcoming fall novel. He explains, "Working with Amy on her upcoming novel, The Valley of Amazement, has been an editor's dream, watching a truly gifted writer take an amazing novel to continually higher and higher levels through enlightened and passionate revision. I'm not only looking forward to the new novel, but excited to know that the essays are going to give all of her many readers insight into how Amy creates her fiction -- and how she goes about making those critical revisions."

Photo: Ecco