Amy Tan does not have a fabulous closet befitting a world-famous author. She is in the midst of cleaning it when BookPage calls to talk about her lush new novel, The Valley of Amazement.

"It's a terrible closet," Tan says with a laugh from her home in New York City. "It's a teeny-tiny closet. The doors keep going off the hinges and I keep having to figure out where to put my winter clothes."

Subpar closet notwithstanding, Tan is having a very good year, highlighted by the publication of her first novel in eight years. The Valley of Amazement is the spellbinding story of Violet, a pampered girl raised by her American mother, Lulu, in Lulu's plush Shanghai courtesan house. When Lulu is tricked into sailing for California during the 1912 revolution, Violet is left behind and sold to another "flower house," where young girls trade companionship and sex for lavish gifts and the hope of one day becoming someone's wife or concubine.

An older courtesan in the house, Magic Gourd, takes Violet under her wing, helping her become one of the most successful courtesans in the city. Violet meets many men during her time as a courtesan and eventually marries an American man and gives birth to their daughter. But when her husband dies of Spanish influenza and his spiteful American wife steals the daughter, Violet must decide whether it is worth reconnecting with her own mother in order to find her daughter again.

Tan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, modeled Violet in some ways after her own grandmother, who was widowed by age 30 and became the concubine of a wealthy man who eventually had seven wives. Whether she joined this household by choice or force is a matter of debate within the family. What is known is that she committed suicide. A haunting photo of her grandmother dressed in the clothing worn by courtesans got Tan wondering how much she really knew about her. Whether her grandmother was actually a courtesan is a fact lost to time, but Tan discovered other surprising things about her during her research.

The courtesans of Shanghai were competitive businesswomen who "wheedled and extracted," Tan says. "They were competitive and jealous."

"I found out during the writing that she was not who people said she was," Tan says. "People had always said she was quiet, traditional, old-fashioned, she stayed home and listened to her husband." Yet when Tan interviewed an older relative, who had lived with Tan's grandmother as a toddler, the relative painted a much different picture of her grandmother as the favorite wife who had a fiery streak.

"She said she was very hot-tempered, and if you did not listen to her, you would regret it," Tan says. "That gave me a sense that she had something more interesting that had tested her more. I think my grandmother had to make her circumstances as best she could."

Tan began writing fiction when she was in her 30s and burst onto the literary scene in 1989 with the publication of The Joy Luck Club, which sold more than 2 million copies and was adapted into a popular film. In the years since, she has extended her critical and commercial success with several novels, including The Kitchen God's Wife, The Bonesetter's Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning.

As with so many of Tan's works, her latest book dives deep into the conflicted relationship of a mother and daughter and explores the questions of how much of life is shaped by circumstance and how much by what is passed down through generations.

"It's such a rich ground for me," says Tan, who had a complicated but close relationship with her own mother. "When you think of identity, much of that stems from parental influences—that huge, constant guide for so many years of your life."

This book is a major departure for Tan in one way: It includes explicit sex scenes and graphic dialogue.

"I've always steered away from writing about sex," she says. "Too many people already think I'm writing about my life. I had thoughts while I was writing about sadism—oh, they're going to think this is based upon my 20 years of experience with beating. But I didn't really care. What I was worried about was writing corny sex scenes. I didn't trust myself that I wouldn't hold back or go overboard."

She talked to several researchers who study the world of courtesans, and read a famous Chinese pornographic novel as well as the journal of a young Chinese man who regularly visited flower houses. While some of the details in the novel are from that research (an aphrodisiac called "Gates Wide Open," for example, was one of Tan's favorites), Tan says she had a great time coming up with other names for aphrodisiacs, genitalia and sexual positions. She also loved imagining the relationships among the courtesans.

"It was fun writing those scenes," she says. "I felt like I was there. These characters were not retiring flowers. They were businesswomen. They wheedled and extracted. They were competitive and jealous.

"I thought the conversations with my editor [Dan Halpern] would be very awkward, but they turned out to be fun conversations," Tan says. "At one point, he wrote ‘Lawrence-ian!' next to one scene. I didn't know whether he meant that was good or bad or too repressed or what. I sent him a long email and at the end of the email, I said ‘Never mind. I'm taking it out.' "

Tan maintains the pace and allure of the story as Violet endures harrowing years of abuse and uncertainty, eventually reconnecting not only with her mother but with the powerful businessman who took her virginity when she was a teenage courtesan.

"Her thing was staying alive," Tan says. "She thought of [her daughter] Flora all the time. It occurs to her what she has to do is find her mother and forgive her. Today, we can expend money, resources, call the FBI, whatever it takes, to find our kid. In that time, they didn't have that ability. We impose our American sensibility on the situation."

Tan may have drawn on her family's history for many elements of the story, but her own marriage is a far cry from Violet's tumultuous love life. She has been married to her husband, Lou, since 1974.

"We like to joke that it's separate closets and separate bathrooms," she says about the secret to their longevity. "We both share similar politics and respect for people. We have similar generosity. We allow a lot of individuality, but also we share a lot of things."

At the time of our conversation, Lou was on a bike tour of French wineries, a trip that Tan chose to skip—"I don't want to get drunk in the afternoon on vacation"—but he will return in time for her upcoming 25-city book tour.

"It's very hard for me to travel alone these days," says Tan, 61, who has experienced occasional seizures since being diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2003. "They're not serious but they leave me very confused. It's better if I have someone with me. He's really good and supportive. He fed me three times a day when I was on deadline with this book."

With that, Tan bids farewell and gets back to working on her closet.

"The exciting life of an author," she says wryly.

NATURAL SELECTION
The Signature of All Things is Elizabeth Gilbert’s first work of fiction in 13 years. Set in the 18th and 19th centuries, this abundantly detailed historical narrative tells the story of the Whittaker family of Philadelphia. Patriarch Henry Whittaker amassed vast wealth in the quinine business in South Africa.

He passes on his fortune and his brilliant intellect to his daughter, Alma, whose interest in botany leads her into the study of evolution. Alma isn’t a beauty, and her bookish pursuits take precedence over romance. When she does fall in love, it’s with an artist named Ambrose Pike, whose reverence for the mystical is at odds with her own rational nature. Passages both literal and figurative ensue for Alma, as she sets out on a journey with stops in Tahiti and Holland to explore the natural world and her own inner terrain. Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) has written a fascinating, deeply authentic story of one woman’s quest to find herself, a book that demonstrates her remarkable range as an author.

FINAL CUT
A smart, spellbinding mystery, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film is a worthy follow-up to the author’s acclaimed debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Filmmaker Stanislas Cordova has an underground following—his dark, disturbing movies have been banned from theaters and become bona fide cult classics. Stanislas’ daughter, Ash ley, a piano prodigy, is featured in his final film. Gorgeous and gifted, Ashley plays Carnegie Hall as a preteen and is dead by the age of 24, when, to all appearances, she commits suicide. Journalist Scott McGrath, an expert on Stanislas and his work, believes there’s more to Ashley’s demise than meets the eye. Along with two friends, Scott begins an investigation into the father-daughter bond and the circumstances surrounding Ashley’s death. Pessl bolsters the story with fictionalized documentary materials—transcripts, articles, screenshots—creating a sense of authenticity that adds to the novel’s appeal. This hypnotic, cleverly crafted thriller provides further proof that Pessl is a writer to be reckoned with.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement is a wide-ranging multigenerational saga that opens in 1914 Shanghai. Violet, the book’s primary narrator, lives with her American mother, Lucia, who’s the mistress of a popular courtesan establishment. When her mother inexplicably departs for San Francisco, Violet finds herself alone in Shanghai. An exotic beauty, Violet becomes a courtesan herself and has a daughter of her own. The novel flashes back to 1800s San Francisco to tell the story of Lucia, a woman very different from the one Violet grew up with. Tan’s rich descriptions of China in the early 1900s and her command of history make this a mesmerizing family epic. Her fans will savor this novel, which finds Tan at the top of her game 25 years after the publication of her luminous debut, The Joy Luck Club.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Shanghai, 1912. Violet Minturn, 14, expects to join her mother on a voyage to San Francisco, but the treachery of a supposed friend separates them, and the boat leaves without her, stranding her as an orphan in China. Much-acclaimed author Tan (The Joy Luck Club) is publishing her first novel in eight years, an epic, as the publisher calls it, that could be termed "a courtesan's handbook." It is also the wrenching, intertwined stories of three women—mother Lucia/Lulu, daughter Violet, and granddaughter Flora—who all three suffer abandonment and loss, then are forced to forge new identities for themselves. The tales (better, travails) of mother and daughter unfold mainly in Shanghai at the turn of the last century, where circumstances force each to become a courtesan to earn her livelihood. Tan introduces us to an extensive cast of well-drawn, authentic-seeming characters who either shape or try to undo the lives of these indomitable women. It should be noted that if the sex in this tale is not graphic, it is certainly frank—and abundant, though well done. VERDICT This utterly engrossing novel is highly recommended to all readers who appreciate an author's ability to transport them to a new world they will not forget. As a plus, this reviewer sensed the harbinger of a sequel by the last page.—Edward Cone, New York

In her first novel since 2009's Saving Fish from Drowning, Tan again explores the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, control and submission, tradition and new beginnings. Jumping from bustling Shanghai to an isolated village in rural China to San Francisco at the turn of the 19th century, the epic story follows three generations of women pulled apart by outside forces. The main focus is Violet, once a virgin courtesan in one of the most reputable houses in Shanghai, who faces a series of crippling setbacks: the death of her first husband from Spanish influenza, a second marriage to an abusive scam artist, and the abduction of her infant daughter, Flora. In a series of flashbacks toward the book's end, Violet's American mother, Lulu, is revealed to have suffered a similar and equally disturbing fate two decades earlier. The choice to cram the truth behind Lulu's sexually promiscuous adolescence in San Francisco, her life as a madam in Shanghai, and Violet's reunion with a grown Flora into the last 150 pages makes the story unnecessarily confusing. Nonetheless, Tan's mastery of the lavish world of courtesans and Chinese customs continues to transport. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. (Nov.)