A publisher is planning to release a newly discovered novel by the late Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck later this year, describing it as a coming-of-age novel about a young man who travels the world.

Buck wrote the novel, titled "The Eternal Wonder," shortly before she died in 1973, according to a joint statement released this week by New York-based Open Road Integrated Media, along with Buck's son, Edgar S. Walsh, and Inkwell, a literary management agency.

Someone found the manuscript in storage in January, according to the statement, and Open Road will publish it in paperback and digital formats Oct. 22.

The publisher describes the novel as the coming-of-age story of a gifted young man whose search for meaning leads him to New York, England, Paris and a mission patrolling the demilitarized zone in Korea.

Buck's most well-known novel, "The Good Earth," won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and helped earn her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. It follows the life of a farmer in pre-Revolutionary China and proved riveting to Americans who knew little about the culture. Buck, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, was born in Hillsboro, W.Va., but lived mostly in China from infancy through age 40.

She raised seven adopted children and wrote many later works at her farm in suburban Bucks County, where she's buried and where her namesake nonprofit, Pearl S. Buck International, is based. The group focuses on adoption, expanding the opportunities for children and promoting cultural understanding.

Pam Carroll, marketing director for the group, declined to say where the manuscript was found. But she said the fact that it was discovered is a testament to the longevity of Buck's works and her prolific nature as an author. Buck, she said, would have been pleased by its release.

"The fact that it is called 'The Eternal Wonder' is fitting," Carroll said.