The Hundred Secret Senses

A story of ghosts, both real and imagined.
A Chinese girl who talks with ghosts travels to San Francisco to live with a stepfamily she's never met. A band of missionaries holes up in a Chinese mansion as they wait to be killed by an approaching army. Two UC-Berkeley students find their romance haunted by the spirit of an ex-girlfriend. These lives collide in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, which crosses continents and generations to interlace ghost stories, romances and tales of sisterhood.

It's Kwan, whose world is shared by spirits, or "yin people," whose momentum truly propels the tale. She is 12 when she arrives in San Francisco, where Olivia (Kwan's half-sister and the book's narrator) and the rest of the family see her as both sympathetic and, well, certifiable. More than 30 years later, Kwan returns to China, this time with Olivia and her soon-to-be-ex-husband Simon. As the three recede deeper into the countryside, Kwan's complicated relationships with both the living and the dead finally weave together into a coherent whole.

Tan narrates the book herself, which is unfortunate: Her voice is too smooth, and her skills too limited to carry the book's emotional range. But her writing is compelling, well-crafted and, on occasion, laugh-out-loud funny. At a time when the "new China" dominates international news, Tan's story gives listeners a window into an earlier, more ethereal Chinese world.