A wealthy Iowa farmer decides to divide his kingdom between his daughters. It is the 1970s and this is rural America but Smiley makes sure there is little chance of her reader missing the deliberate parallels with King Lear. Ginny Cook explains how a series of events changed the rural routine her family has pursued for three generations. A thoughtful, anxious, confiding narrator, she is devastated by her inability to have children. Her sister Rose is recovering from cancer. At the centre of Ginny and Rose's life is their domineering father whom they have feared and tended since their mother's early death. The two women were also left to raise their remote, ungrateful youngest sister Caroline. Spared their father's tyranny, she rejected tradition and has become a lawyer. There are no linguistic fireworks on offer here. It is a tale of tensions, betrayals and tragedies. Smiley's relentlessly powerful domestic epic, first published in 1991, is one of America's finest post-war novels.
