A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
8 Rating(s)
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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A Thousand Acres

Author: Jane Smiley

Narrator: C.J. Critt

Unabridged: 14 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 04/25/2008


Synopsis

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Jane Smiley’s spellbinding novel also headed bestseller lists for many months. A Thousand Acres is the powerful, mythic story of an American farm family and the land that nourishes and consumes its members.

Three daughters and their husbands are pulled into a tangle of love, jealousy, and fear when their father, Larry Cook, grows too old to manage the family’s fertile thousand acre farm. As each couple struggles with their own tragedies and challenges, they know their father is judging them in light of the weighty inheritance that hovers within their reach.

The Cook family, and the farm community around them, are part of a mosaic that is as enduring as the fences and fields of the broad midwestern landscape. But this endurance exacts an immense price from them in return.

“… a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres, of the human heart.”—The Washington Post Book World

About Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, works of nonfiction, and books for young adults, including A Thousand Acres and the Last Hundred Years trilogy, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will

“…Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he’s done before is still......more

Goodreads review by Glen

When this book was chosen by our book club for this month's theme of "tragedy," I approached reading it with some trepidation. There are a number of things that I don't care for in literature, and one of them is the family drama which centers on the drama as drama for its own sake, rather than to sa......more

Goodreads review by Violet

Smiley uses King Lear as her framework for this novel. We have the ailing patriarch, a kingdom in decline and his three contesting daughters. And as you’re reading you’re often wondering to what extent Smiley is going to mirror the Shakespeare plot. The plot of King Lear would be melodramatic vaudev......more

Goodreads review by Jaline

For three generations, the Cook family have worked hard to create a thriving agriculture operation, draining swamplands, turning the weeds and grass into rich fertile soil. As time went on, their holdings eventually reached what felt like a magic number to the family – a thousand acres. Larry Cook de......more