The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan read by Lorelei King and Pik-Sen Lim

The Bonesetter's Daughter
Amy Tan
Read by Lorelei King and Pik-Sen Lim
Running time 3 hrs
HarperCollins £8.99

The mystery of China has always been an evocative subject for fiction. Perhaps it is the old superstitions and legends that provoke such passion. The Bonesetter's Daughter is a story based on such superstition. It is a many-layered tale of the complex relationship between mothers and daughters.

It begins in present-day San Francisco with LuLing, a Chinese woman in her eighties whose senial dementia is exacerbated by the guilt she feels for the death of Precious Auntie, the 'nursemaid' of her childhood in China and the daughter of the bonesetter, a woman with a blackened, scarred face and burned mouth, who only 'blind beggars could bear to look upon'.

It is also the story of Ruth, LuLing's daughter, who has been brought up in America and who, at 46, moves in with her ailing mother to look after her. As a petulant teenager, she played on her mother's superstitious nature and only in adulthood discovers the extent of the hurt she caused. It is no secret that Amy Tan wrote a first draft of this book after her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and that there are similarities between Ruth and Tan.

The other thing about Chinese fiction is that it sounds good. Lorelei King is faultless without stealing the show from Pik-Sen Lim, who obviously delights in the richness and tragedy of a Chinese imagination.