The Satisfaction Cafe
Published on 1. July 2025
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-6680-6892-2 (ISBN)
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.
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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Simon & Schuster
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 38 mm
Weight
499 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-6680-6892-2 (9781668068922)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Kathy Wang is the author of Family Trust, Imposter Syndrome, and The Satisfaction Café. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School, and lives in the Bay Area.