The Mother

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth: The story of a peasant woman in pre-revolutionary China who is abandoned by her husband. "The Mother has an architectural unity and a driving simplicity and strength . . . [and] has almost an elemental quality." —The New York Times Dickensian in its epic sweep, one of Pearl S. Buck's finest novels centers on an unnamed peasant woman in pre-revolutionary China. Without warning, her restless husband abandons her. Shamed by the experience, she is left to work the land, raise their three children on her own, and care for her aging mother-in-law. To save face with her neighbors, she pretends her husband is traveling, and sends letters to herself signed in his name. Surrounded by poverty, despair, and a growing web of lies meant to protect the family, her children grow up and enter society with only the support of their mother's unbreakable will. An unforgettable story of one woman's strength and a remarkable fable about the role of mothers, this novel is a powerful achievement by a New York Times–bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning master of twentieth-century fiction. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author's estate