In her beloved New York Times bestsellers, including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, Dreams of Joy, and China Dolls, Lisa See has brilliantly illuminated the strong bonds between women, romantic love, and love of country.

In See’s newest, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, she returns to those timeless themes. A powerful story about a family separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little-known region and its people and celebrates the bond between mothers and daughters. It explores the lives of a Chinese mother and her daughter, who has been adopted by an American couple. Both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations.

See has always been intrigued by stories that have been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up, whether in the past or the present. For Snow Flower, she traveled to a remote area of China—where she was told she was only the second foreign ever to visit—to research the secret writing invented, used, and kept private by women for over a thousand years. Amy Tan called the novel “achingly beautiful, a marvel of imagination.” Others agreed, and foreign-language rights for Snow Flower were sold to 39 countries. The novel also became a New York Times bestseller and a Booksense Number One Pick. It has won numerous other awards domestically and internationally, and was made into a feature film produced by Fox Searchlight. See’s most recent, China Dolls, the story of Asian-American nightclub performers of the 1930s and 1940s, was her fourth instant New York Times bestseller. O, The Oprah Magazine called it “a spellbinding portrait of a time burning with opportunity and mystery.”

See grew up in Los Angeles, where she spent a lot of time with her father’s family in Chinatown. Her first book, the national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book On Gold Mountain: The One Hundred Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, traces the journey of her great-grandfather, Fong See, who overcame obstacles at every step to become the 100-year-old godfather of Los Angeles’s Chinatown and the patriarch of a sprawling family. While collecting the details for On Gold Mountain, she developed the idea for her first novel, Flower Net, which was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and on the Los Angeles Times Best Books List. Flower Net was also nominated for an Edgar Award for best first novel. This was followed by two more mystery-thrillers, The Interior and Dragon Bones, which once again featured the characters of Liu Hulan and David Stark. This series inspired critics to compare See to Upton Sinclair, Dashiell Hammett, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

See was the Publishers Weekly West Coast Correspondent for thirteen years, and her writing has appeared in Vogue, Self, and More, as well as in numerous book reviews around the country. See was named the National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women in 2001. She is also the recipient of the Chinese American Museum’s History Makers Award and the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. See is an active member of the Los Angeles arts community, where she served as guest curator for an exhibit on the Chinese-American experience at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage and helped develop and curate their Family Discovery Gallery, an interactive space for children and their families. She also curated the inaugural exhibition for the grand opening of the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles.

For more information on Lisa See, please visit www.lisasee.com/.