In its solidity and poise, A Thousand Acres is a book that will outlast this year's rainy season.' Vogue 'Powerful, poignant, intimate and involving. Its style is relaxed, conversational, unhurried the novel flows gently onwards like a broad river. On a prospering Iowa farm in the 1970s, wealthy farmer Lawrence Cook announces his intentions to divide the farm among his daughters, setting off a family. There may have been better novels than A Thousand Acres, but I fear I didn't read them - a haunting inquisition into the decline and fall of a family.' Independent 'A studied, ingenious variation on the brutal clashing of sexes and generations in King Lear.

A Thousand Acres is a great American tragedy about the failure of a family's land and the failure of its love. Jane Smiley notes that her novel A Billion Acres was precipitated by a fewer accidents. It is 1979, and Larry Cook wants to deed his farm to his three daughters, only two of whom care about farming. Its success is down to Smiley's ambitious gusto, her intuitive handling of the relationship between character and landscape, and her willingness to haul genuine moral freight across the panorama she has so expertly painted.' Sunday Times 'Epic fiction of the very highest order, naturalistic, penetrating and wholly absorbing.' Literary Review 'Superlative, extraordinary, amazing. For distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Three thousand dollars (3,000). Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, published in 1991, tells the story of the Cook family, who live on the largest farm in Zebulon County, Iowa. 'A Thousand Acres is a strong, gnarled shocker of a novel!superb.

A thousand acres smiley