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Book of the Week

Audiobooks

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones

Book of the Week: Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones: Episode 5

Factual: Life Stories

Factual: History

Burying The Bones

Episode 5

Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones, Episode 5

As she enters a frail old age, Pearl Buck continues to shock and surprise her friends.

Despite her frail old age, Pearl Buck still shocks and surprises friends with her bizarre life choices. Read by Lindsay Duncan.

Lindsay Duncan reads the final extract from Hilary Spurling's new book: "Burying The Bones". The distinguished biographer's subject is the astonishing life of Pearl Buck, one of the most successful and popular American novelists of the 20th Century.

In today's episode we learn that as she entered old age, Pearl's indomitable spirit continued to shine as she shocked and surprised her family with a series of bizarre life choices. Pearl never quite recovered her equilibrium after the death of her second husband and, surrounded by a coterie of flamboyant young men, became increasingly cloistered - receiving visitors in a 'throne' room; a strange echo of the last days of her childhood heroine, the last empress of China.

Though her work has now fallen out of fashion, in her day Pearl Buck was a phenomenal bestseller. The novel that made her name was "The Good Earth" which depicted for the first time the gruelling conditions of China's rural poor. Born to Presbyterian missionaries in 1890s China, Buck's first hand experience of the language and people informed her writing and helped to change Western perceptions of that country forever; in recognition of which she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.

Abridger: Alison Joseph.
Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Lindsay Duncan reads from Hilary Spurling's biography of the American writer Pearl Buck

Lindsay Duncan reads from Hilary Spurling's biography of Pearl Buck, the influential American writer whose novels helped change Western perceptions of China forever

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