The first instalment in the Pulitzer Prize-winner's masterpiece - a trilogy following one family over a hundred years
Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1987. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her latest novel, Private Life, was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.
So here it is at last, the Great American Novel and, in retrospect,
it seems obvious that the great Jane Smiley would be the one who
wrote it. Some Luck is a Steinbeckian Little House on the Prairie:
a rural tragedy, a domestic epic and an unassuming masterpiece.
And, unlike most masterpieces, it's absorbing, witty, painful,
pleasurable. You must read it.
*Charlotte Mendelson, Booker/Orange Prize nominated author of
Almost English and When We Were Bad*
A masterpiece in the making . . . intimate, miraculous-the
auspicious beginning of an American saga every bit as ambitious as
Updike's magnum opus, anchored in the satisfactions and challenges
of life on a farm, but expanding to various American cities and
beyond . . . Frank is one of the most fascinating and complex
characters in recent fiction. The way Smiley gets deep inside all
the children's heads is a staggering literary feat in which we see
human character being assembled in something that feels like real
time. An abundant harvest.
*USA Today*
Some Luck is set in the rural farming community of the Midwestern
America state of Iowa, the world previously evoked by Jane Smiley
so successfully in her 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning hit A Thousand
Acres . . . Fans of big-cast family sagas with love and death and
the world at large impinging only lightly - but tellingly - on
events will love Some Luck. It is an easy and engrossing read with
the cornfields, the snowstorms and the technological developments
of the 20th century vividly evoked.
*Independent*
Try to pin Jane Smiley down at your peril: she is as likely to
write a campus novel (Moo) as a 14th-century historical saga (The
Greenlanders) or a foray into the world of breeders and racetracks
(Horse Heaven) . . . Some Luck is not simply an observation of
family life and the pressures it is naturally susceptible to; it is
also a dissection of the idea of family, and of the truths its
facade will shield from view.
*Guardian*
Smiley's gifts as a storyteller are in full force from the first
page, drawing us into the lives of the characters. The children
especially, with their emerging personalities, are marvellously
evoked.
*Financial Times*
Smiley is a master storyteller, with a penchant for turning
archetypal allegories into seemingly straightforward, contemporary
narratives . . . Jane Smiley is that rare three-fer: meticulous
historian, intelligent humorist and seasoned literary novelist. But
what makes a Smiley novel identifiably and deliciously hers alone
is a unique brand of impassioned critical patriotism . . . Some
Luck is the first in a trilogy to be called "The Last Hundred
Years." Like Smiley herself, the project is ambitious and coyly
clever.
*LA TIMES*
Audaciously delicious . . . Every character here steals our heart.
Smiley has turned her considerable talents to the story of an Iowa
farm and the people who inhabit it. The suspense is found in the
impeccably drawn scenes and in the myriad ways in which Smiley
narrows and opens her camera's lens. Her language has the intimacy
of a first-person telling; her stance is in-the-moment. Always at
the narrative hearth stand Walter and Rosanna and that Iowa farm, a
character in its own right, a landscape remembered by those who
flee to Chicago, Italy, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and New York
. . . We read these lives, and we find our own.
*CHICAGO TRIBUNE*
Some Luck opens with a Langdon family tree. Even before we get to
know Rosanna, Walter, and their children, the sprawling branches
reveal the scope of this novel, which begins in 1920. Smiley, who
devotes a chapter per year to the Langdons' Iowa farm life, depicts
both disasters and heartbreaks in an unruffled tone. The good news?
This is the first of a trilogy. The bad news? We have to wait for
the next volume.
*ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY*
Engaging, bold . . . Smiley delivers a straightforward,
old-fashioned tale of rural family life in changing times,
depicting isolated farm life with precision . . . It is especially
satisfying to hear a powerful writer narrate men's and women's
lives lovingly and with equal attention. Subtle, wry and
moving.
*WASHINGTON POST*
Moving and alert and alive . . . A book about the ordinary nothings
that, in the end, are everything . . . To capture this experience -
finitude, love, sorrow, the rise and fall of generations - is
insanely difficult. To foster the illusion of realism in a
novelistic fantasy, to convey the passage of time.
*Spectator*
Some Luck is as rich, beautiful and brilliant as Smiley's
Pulitzer-Prize-winning A Thousand Acres. Place bets now for this
year's Booker.
*Saga magazine*
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