Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China [Hardcover]

'Pearl Buck is one of the greatest writers on China, and Hilary Spurling has brought her and the China of her time to life with amazing immediacy and perception.' --Jung Chang, author of 'Wild Swans' and biographer of 'Mao'

'Thrilling... After Burying the Bones, you won't want to read anything that isn't by Buck, expect for books about China...' --The Sunday Times

`Immensely readable... She marshals her material beautifully... and shows the remarkable impact of Buck's work.' --Siobhan Murphy, Metro

'A gripping biography... haunting stuff.' --Peter Burton, Daily Express

`Boldly conceived and magnificently written ... a triumphant landmark in the development of creative biography.' --Elaine Showalter, Literary Review

`Magical' --Mail on Sunday, `Must Read'

`An elegant and sympathetic portrait of one of the most extraordinary Americans of the 20th century' --Isabel Hilton, Guardian

`A biographical masterpiece' --Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

Spurling, who has never written a dull sentence, also has magic power as a writer' --Frances Wilson, Sunday Times

`A subtle and masterly book' --Victoria Glendinning, Spectator

`A spellbinding, lyrical and completely unputdownable book... the most compelling and hair-raising biography that I have ever read.' --Miranda Seymour, The Lady

`Superb... a terrific story, told with rare intelligence and refinement... We are fortunate that Spurling has turned her attention eastwards.' --George Walden, Mail on Sunday

`A riveting account' --Lucy Lethbridge, The Tablet

`A fascinating dissection of tortured family relationships... revealing the tortured relationship between the West and China in those turbulent days' --The Economist

`One hell of a story... Spurling is a very fine writer, who couldn't turn a shoddy sentence if she tried' --The Scotsman

`Genius... entirely new kind of literary biography... that uses the work to write the life... Mere fiction dims by comparison.' --Jerusha McCormack, Irish Times

`A fine portrait by a terrific storyteller... Spurling should be applauded for bringing this remarkable woman back to us.'
--Sun Shuyun, Observer

`It's out-of-time, out of fashion, but has an enduring bright intelligence and is one of the books of the year' --Richard Davenport-Hines, Sunday Telegraph

`A hugely entertaining read... boasts a narrative as compelling as any pot-boiler...a treasure ... a compelling account.' --Sunday Business Post

`A triumph of intellectual and human sympathy, exploring the frontiers between reality and imagination, between goodness and madness.' -- Maggie Fergusson, Intelligent Life

'A nimble but densely textured account of the American novelist's life-defining spell in China, through a pivotal period of the country's recent history' -- Independent

A thrilling portrait of the extraordinary childhood of Pearl Buck, the now-forgotten bestselling Nobel Prize winning novelist and author of The Good Earth

Pearl Buck was raised in China by her American parents, Presbyterian missionaries from Virginia. Blonde and blue-eyed she looked startlingly foreign, but felt as at home as her Chinese companions. She ran free on the grave-littered grasslands behind her house, often stumbling across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. Buck's father was a terrifying figure, with a maniacal zeal for religious conversion - a passion rarely shared by the local communities he targeted. He drained the family's budget for his Chinese translation of the New Testament, while his aggrieved, long-suffering wife did her utmost to create a homely environment for her children, several of whom died tragically young. Pearl Buck would eventually rise to eminence in America as a bestselling author (her most renowned work, The Good Earth, re-entered the bestseller charts in 2004 when it was selected for Oprah's Book Club) but in this startlingly original biography, Spurling recounts with elegance and great insight her unspeakable upbringing in a China that was virtually unknown to the West.

Pearl Buck was the first person since Marco Polo to open China up to the West. She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, a worldwide bestseller in 1932 that won her the Nobel Prize for Literature. She foresaw China's future as a superpower long before anyone else. She witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution as a teenager, and narrowly escaped being killed herself in the subsequent battles between Communists and Nationalists. Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the Boxers' terrorist uprising forced her family to flee for their lives. Flood, famine, drought, bandits and war formed the background of Pearl's life in China. 'Asia was the real, the actual world,' she said, 'and my own country became the dreamworld.' Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It transfixed a whole generation of readers. Spurling explores with elegance and insight the hair-raising family life, the traumatic disruptions and revolutionary ferment that shaped a powerful and prophetic imagination.

'Pearl Buck is one of the greatest writers on China, and Hilary Spurling has brought her and the China of her time to life with amazing immediacy and perception.' Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans 'It is magnificent - a stunning story and virtuoso writing. All Spurling's books are wonderful but this really takes her in new and strange and unfamiliar directions - boldly conceived, brilliantly executed. Brava brava brava!' Elaine Showalter 'From its wonderful opening sentence to its poignant close, this is a superb biography ... I couldn't wait to turn the page.' Peter Conn, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Hilary Spurling is the author of the universally acclaimed biography of Henri Matisse which was the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2005. Her biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett won the Heinemann and Duff Cooper prizes. She has also written biographies of Paul Scott and La Grande Thérèse (Profile). She has been an arts critic for the Spectator, Observer and Telegraph, and lives in London.