Peony (Library Edition): A Novel of China

Peony is sold into a rich Chinese household as a bondmaid - a role in which she is more a servant, but less a daughter. As she grows into a lovely, young woman, Peony falls in love with the family's only son. However, tradition forbids them to wed.

Pearl S. Buck recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide best-seller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China's future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China's building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.