Lisa See Books in Order

If you’re new to Lisa See: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.
For a sweeping family saga: Shanghai Girls → Dreams of Joy.
If you want a contemporary mother–daughter story: The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane.
If you like crime and legal thrillers: Flower Net → The Interior → Dragon Bones.
If you’re curious about her own family history: On Gold Mountain.

Lisa See was born in Paris in 1955 and grew up mostly in Los Angeles, where she moved through two worlds at once. At home with her mother, novelist Carolyn See, she saw how a creative life could be both joyful and demanding. With her father’s Chinese American family, she spent long days in Chinatown, listening to relatives tell stories in the aisles of the family antique store.

As a child she was surrounded by cousins, uncles, and aunties, many of them descended from her great‑grandfather Fong See, a Chinese immigrant who became a prominent businessman in Los Angeles’s old Chinatown. Those weekends in the shop gave her a feeling of belonging and fed a fascination with how family legends and everyday objects carry history.

For years she insisted she would never be a writer, even though both her mother and her maternal grandfather made their living with words.

See studied at Loyola Marymount University and spent time in Greece at a Balkan studies institute, where travel only sharpened her sense of being between cultures. One morning while living on a Greek island, she woke up with the simple thought that changed everything: she could write. Back in the United States she began freelancing, soon becoming the West Coast correspondent for a publishing trade magazine and writing pieces for a range of national outlets.

Her first book, the memoir On Gold Mountain, grew out of interviews with dozens of relatives about how Fong See and his American wife, Ticie, built a family and businesses on the sometimes hostile ground of the American West. The book became a national bestseller and later inspired an opera and museum exhibitions about the Chinese American experience in California.

Fiction followed. In the Red Princess mysteries—Flower Net, The Interior, and Dragon Bones—See paired Chinese security inspector Liu Hulan with American lawyer David Stark to explore crime, corruption, and loyalty in the complicated years when China was opening to global capitalism.

Over time she moved toward large‑scale historical novels that center on women’s lives and friendships.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan looks back to nineteenth‑century Hunan, following a laotong, or sworn sisterhood, between two girls whose bond is recorded on a secret fan. Peony in Love slips between the living world and the afterlife in seventeenth‑century China, while Shanghai Girls and its sequel Dreams of Joy trace two sisters and a daughter from wartime Shanghai to Los Angeles and then into Mao’s China. In China Dolls she focuses on three young performers trying to build careers in the Chinatown nightclub scene of the 1930s and 40s, against a backdrop of wartime suspicion and Japanese American incarceration.

In later books she has widened her lens beyond mainland China while keeping her core interests. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane links an Akha tea‑growing village in Yunnan with the life of a Chinese adoptee in California. The Island of Sea Women follows the friendship of two women in a community of haenyeo divers on Korea’s Jeju Island across decades of occupation, war, and political violence. Lady Tan’s Circle of Women reimagines the life of a Ming‑dynasty woman doctor, and Daughters of the Sun and Moon returns to nineteenth‑century Los Angeles to tell the stories of Chinese women caught in racism and anti‑immigrant violence.

Across all of this work, See comes back to a few obsessions: the ties between mothers and daughters, the way history presses on private lives, and the details of ordinary women’s work. She is known for exhaustive on‑the‑ground research, but on a daily level her process is simple—she aims to write about a thousand words every morning and lets the pages pile up. She lives in Los Angeles, stays deeply involved with local arts and Chinese American cultural organizations, and continues to travel widely, gathering stories that might become the seed of the next book.