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Book of the Week

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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 2

Factual: Life Stories

Factual: History

Burying The Bones

Episode 2

Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones, Episode 2

Pearl Buck's missionary family face violence and famine in early 20th-century China.

How novelist Pearl Buck's missionary family faced violence and famine in early 20th-century China. Read by Lindsay Duncan.

Lindsay Duncan reads from "Burying The Bones" - the latest book by acclaimed biographer Hilary Spurling. Her subject is Pearl Buck one of the most successful and popular American novelists of the 20th Century.

Though her work has now fallen out of fashion, in her day Pearl was a phenomenal bestseller. The novel that made her name was "The Good Earth" - and it still sells in its thousands - 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.

In today's episode, we learn more about Pearl's childhood and the ways in which her father's missionary zeal impoverished his family. A firebrand preacher who was often absent for long periods of time, he invariably spent his meagre wages on a project to translate the New Testament into Chinese. Pearl's mother lost four children to illnesses which could have been treated easily had they better access to food and medicine. This was the potent environment which formed Pearl and inspired her adult imagination.

Abridger: Alison Joseph
Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.

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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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