Also of interest ... in 20th-century novelists

Burying the Bones

by Hilary Spurling

(Simon & Schuster, $27)

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Hilary Spurling has made Pearl Buck relevant again, said Richard Davenport-Hines in the London Sunday Telegraph. Buck’s bighearted novels about rural China won her a Nobel Prize but little lasting respect. Now Spurling has turned Buck’s life story into a “sad, harrowing” tale about a sensitive child of American missionaries to China, as she comes to grips with the realization that her messianic parents are “obtuse, self-centered, and blundering.”

Muriel Spark

by Martin Stannard

(Norton, $35)

“Like a lot of great writers,” mischievous, Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark “was actually a bit of a monster,” said Charles McGrath in The New York Times. Martin Stannard’s “thorough, judicious, and insightful” new portrait of Spark makes too many apologies for its subject’s flaws, but you can see the truth by reading between the lines. “A neglectful mother, a mercurial and inconstant friend,” Spark was ruthlessly devoted to her art for nearly 50 years. “She behaved, in short, like any number of male writers.”

A Great Unrecorded History

by Wendy Moffat

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $32.50)

The “almost desperately shy” author of Howard’s End and A Room With a View “surely would have been appalled at having his deepest secrets trotted out for public examination,” said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. Yet that’s what Wendy Moffat does in this “earnest, rather self-satisfied” account of E.M. Forster’s closeted homosexual life. Her focus on the affairs that Forster kept secret crowds out exploration of his enduring work.

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

by Selina Hastings

(Random House, $35)

Past biographers have been fascinated by the role Somerset Maugham’s “furtive homosexuality” played in his life, but this “uncommonly absorbing” book lets us see its subject “in full,” said Martin Rubin in The Wall Street Journal. Maugham was the most popular writer of his day; the 98 movies created from his work remain a record. He was also a husband, a father, and a British spy. Selina Hastings writes beautifully and adeptly combines “sympathy for her subjects with a tough-minded sense of their less pleasant traits.”