She's Come Undone


Book Description

Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the chocolate, crisps and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up. In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections.




A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth


Book Description

A Study Guide for Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.




The Good Earth


Book Description




Sons


Book Description

DIVThe second installment in Pearl S. Buck’s acclaimed Good Earth trilogy: the powerful story of three brothers whose greed will bring their family to the brink of ruin/divDIV Sons begins where The Good Earth ended: Revolution is sweeping through China. Wang Lung is on his deathbed in the house of his fathers, and his three sons stand ready to inherit his hard-won estate. One son has taken the family’s wealth for granted and become a landlord; another is a thriving merchant and moneylender; the youngest, an ambitious general, is destined to be a leader in the country. Through all his life’s changes, Wang did not anticipate that each son would hunger to sell his beloved land for maximum profit./divDIV /divDIVAt once a tribute to early Chinese fiction, a saga of family dissension, and a depiction of the clashes between old and new, Sons is a vivid and compelling masterwork of fiction. /divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate./div




The Eternal Wonder


Book Description

DIVDIVDIVLost for forty years, a new novel by the author of The Good Earth/divDIV The Eternal Wonder tells the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax (Rann for short), an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea that will change his life forever—and, ultimately, to love./divDIV Rann falls for the beautiful and equally brilliant Stephanie Kung, who lives in Paris with her Chinese father and has no contact with her American mother, who abandoned the family when Stephanie was six years old. Both Rann and Stephanie yearn for a sense of genuine identity. Rann feels plagued by his voracious intellectual curiosity and strives to integrate his life of the mind with his experience in the world. Stephanie feels alienated from society by her mixed heritage and struggles to resolve the culture clash of her existence. Separated for long periods of time, their final reunion leads to a conclusion that even Rann, in all his hard-earned wisdom, could never have imagined./divDIV A moving and mesmerizing fictional exploration of the themes that meant so much to Pearl Buck in her life, The Eternal Wonder is perhaps her most personal and passionate work, and will no doubt appeal to the millions of readers who have treasured her novels for generations./div/div/div




The Big Wave


Book Description

The classic tale of a Japanese boy orphaned by a tsunami from the author of The Good Earth, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. On a mountainside in Japan, two boys enjoy a humble life governed by age-old customs. Jiya belongs to a family of fishermen; his best friend, Kino, farms rice. But when a neighboring volcano erupts and a tidal wave swallows their village—including Jiya’s family—life as they know it is changed forever. The orphaned Jiya must learn to come to terms with his grief. Now facing a profoundly different life than the one he’d always taken for granted, he must decide on a new way forward. Written with graceful simplicity, The Big Wave won the Children’s Book Award of the Child Study Association of America when it was first released. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.




Pavilion of Women


Book Description

A “vivid and extremely interesting” novel of an upper-class Chinese wife’s quest for freedom, from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth (The New Yorker). At forty, Madame Wu is beautiful and much respected as the wife of one of China’s oldest upper-class houses. Her birthday wish is to find a young concubine for her husband and to move to separate quarters, starting a new chapter of her life. When her wish is granted, she finds herself at leisure, no longer consumed by running a sixty-person household. Now she’s free to read books previously forbidden her, to learn English, and to discover her own mind. The family in the compound are shocked at the results, especially when she begins learning from a progressive, excommunicated Catholic priest. In its depiction of life in the compound, Pavilion of Women includes some of Buck’s most enchanting writing about the seasons, daily rhythms, and customs of women in China. It is a delightful parable about the sexes, and of the profound and transformative effects of free thought. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.




Dragon Seed


Book Description

A New York Times–bestselling historical novel about the Japanese invasion of Nanking from the author of The Good Earth. Farmer Liang Tan knows only a quiet, traditional life in his remote Chinese farming community. When news filters in that Japanese forces are invading the country, he and his fellow villagers believe that if they behave decently to the Japanese soldiers, the civilians might remain undisturbed. They’re in for a shock, as the attackers lay waste to the country and install a puppet government designed to systematically carry out Japanese interests. In response, the Chinese farmers and their families form a resistance—which not only carries grave risk, but also breaks their vow of nonviolence, leading them to wonder if they’re any different than their enemy. Later adapted into a film featuring Katharine Hepburn, Dragon Seed is a brilliant and unflinching look at the horrors of war. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.




The Good Earth Trilogy


Book Description

The Pulitzer Prize–winning classic novel of China, together with its two sequels—by the Nobel Prize winner. The Good Earth is Buck’s classic, Pulitzer Prize–winning story of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer, and his wife, O-lan, a former slave. With luck and hard work, the couple’s fortunes improve over the years: They have sons and save steadily until one day they can afford to buy property in the House of Wang—the very house in which O-lan used to work. But success brings with it a new set of problems. Wang soon finds himself the target of jealousy, and as good harvests come and go, so does the social order. Will Wang’s family cherish the estate after he’s gone? The family’s story continues in Sons and A House Divided, when the Revolution sweeping through China further unsettles Wang Lung’s family in this rich and unforgettable portrait of a family and a country in the throes of widespread national change.




The Enemy


Book Description

During World War II, Dr. Sadao Hoki, a Japanese surgeon, discovers an escaped American prisoner of war who needs an operation to survive