The Mother, Third and final volume of the trilogy that began with The Good Earth.

Mrs. Buck has never done better work than this [The Mother]. By a great gift of intuition she has entered into the mind, heart and spirit of the Chinese peasant woman and revealed the permanent values of life.--Times [London] Literary Supplement

In none of her previous books is Pearl Buck's distinctive literary style better exhibited than in The Mother. The simple majestic English of the King James version of the Bible seems perfectly suited to the depiction of primitive life.--Christian Century The Mother has an architectural unity and a driving simplicity and strength to a degree more marked than in any of Mrs. Buck's previous work. That simplicity and strength has almost an elemental quality. And not only that; it has been Mrs. Buck's achievement that she has rendered this life of a people alien from ourselves in terms of universal human values....--The New York Times

From a handful of lusterless pebbles a jeweler produces glittering gems, so from the humble life of a Chinese hamlet Mrs. Buck produces a rich, a moving, an absorbing tale.... Mrs. Buck is a novelist to whom life unfolds its secrets.--Saturday Review

The Mother, third and final volume of the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, explores in prose stunning in simplicity and tone the journey through life of a Chinese peasant mother and her children, one of whom it is discovered is blind. This stoic woman, who is never named but is anything but anonymous, assumes a type of grandeur in our eyes as she encounters and manages to overcome the pains of the passage of time, her life, in which the years are long and lonely and hard, experiencing in the end a type of transcendent joy due to the birth of a grandson.

I never had the privilege of meeting Pearl Buck, but her father, Absalom Sydenstricker, is the one who opened our station in China over a hundred years ago. He was highly respected by his fellow missionaries.... Undoubtedly Pearl Buck knew China and the Chinese people as few missionary children did.... She was an incredible writer and had a great heart.

Ruth B. Graham Mrs. Buck's latest novel is simple and effective. It is so direct in its appeal to the emotions that it draws tears to the eyes. And it has a certain quality common to some of the world's finest books and peculiarly satisfying in whatever book it appears, of presenting its characters safe, in the integrity of their destinies....