The Eternal Wonder: A Novel - Softcover

REVIEW QUOTES: PRAISE FOR THE GOOD EARTH "[Buck] did for the working people of twentieth-century China something of what Dickens had done for London's nineteenth-century poor." -Hilary Spurling, author of Pearl Buck in China "One need never have lived in China or know anything about the Chinese to understand [The Good Earth] or respond to its appeal." -Boston Evening Transcript "One of the most important and revealing novels of our time." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "A comment upon the meaning and tragedy of life as it is lived in any age in any quarter of the globe." -The New York Times

Lost for forty years, a new novel by the author of The Good Earth 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. 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. 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.