The Satisfaction Café
A Novel
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3.8 • 23 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
National Bestseller
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and The Minnesota Star Tribune
Named a Best Book of the Summer by People, Oprah Daily, and Today
A LibraryReads Top 10 Pick
How do we live so that we are satisfied? How can people connect during moments of loneliness? This is the story of Joan Liang, a woman who moves across the world to America, and in trying to answer these questions builds a wildly original life.
Joan’s life is a series of unexpected events: she never thought she would live in California, nor did she expect her first marriage to implode—especially as quickly and spectacularly as it did. She definitely did not expect to fall in love with an older, wealthy American man and become his fourth wife and mother to his youngest children.
Joan and her children grow older, and one day she makes a drastic change: she opens the Satisfaction Café, a place where customers can find connection through conversation. With humor and grace, Joan creates a space for meaningful relationships and constructs a lasting legacy.
Vivid, comic, and profoundly moving, The Satisfaction Café is a novel about found family, the joy and loneliness that come with age, and how we can seek satisfaction at any stage of life. This is a novel of tremendous pleasures: sentences that teem with rich observations, wonderful plotting, and, in Joan, a protagonist for the ages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The crisp and assured latest from Wang (Family Trust) follows a Taiwanese woman's life in the U.S., beginning with graduate studies at Stanford in the 1970s and extending through two marriages and the fulfillment of a long-held dream. Joan's first marriage, to a fellow student, is disastrous and blessedly brief. She then marries Bill, a wealthy man more than two decades her senior, with whom she has one child and adopts another. Along the way, she awkwardly learns to navigate Bill's rarified world while raising a family in his famous modernist house in Palo Alto. Throughout the novel, Joan fantasizes about opening a café, the mission of which would be to address the "global deficit in satisfaction" by offering patrons sweet or savory treats along with the chance to meet a willing listener. After her children are grown and Bill dies from natural causes, she opens the Satisfaction Café on the site of a shuttered Chinese video store. Independent and pragmatic, but also secretly soulful, Joan is a character capable of surprising the reader at every turn, especially as she faces the difficulties of growing old. Wang has a light touch, whether in describing events that are heavy or mundane, and avoids sentimentality. This gratifies.
