WRITER Pearl Buck was the first person to try to explain China to the West and the first American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature. The daughter of American missionaries, she grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She spoke Chinese before she spoke English and thought she was Chinese.

Her childhood friends were the children of poor Chinese farmers.

She knew China from the inside out and when she and her family were forced to flee the country, she wrote about it in her worldwide best-seller The Good Earth.

This biography is a fascinating insight into China at the start of the 20th Century, but it is also a brilliant picture of family life. Pearl’s four older siblings died before she was born. Her father was a missionary of intense single – or bloody – mindedness.

He made just ten converts in ten years and spent most of his money translating the Bible into Mandarin. Pearl’s US husband was an agricultural expert who transformed China’s farming practices, but who was totally wrong for his wife, who, to be fair, was equally wrong for him.

Pearl Buck’s later life was spent in the US where she campaigned for human rights, but never quite fitted in.

This is a riveting biography, which tells you about so much more than one woman’s life.

And the title? When Pearl was a small child, the hill behind her house was scattered with the bones of unwanted baby girls. Pearl would gather the bones and bury them, carefully marking each one with a heap of pebbles and flowers. Leaves its mark on you that sort of thing.