Some Luck

2016 Longlist

1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five.

Each chapter in this extraordinary novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values and pass them on to their children. With the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change through the early 1950s, we watch as the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis. Later still, a girl we’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own.

The first volume of an epic trilogy, Some Luck starts us on a literary adventure through cycles of birth and death, passion and betrayal that will span a century in America.

(from publisher)

About the Author

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Some Luck and Early Warning, the first volumes of The Last Hundred Years trilogy. She is also the author of five works of nonfiction and a series of books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.

Librarian’s Comments

Beginning in 1920, through the Cold War, Smiley explores the lives, thoughts and emotions of an Iowa farm family. Smiley has the ability to make us care about the joys, sorrows, triumphs, and everyday experiences of her engaging characters as portrayed against large historical events, especially the Great Depression. The first in a projected trilogy, readers will anxiously be awaiting the next instalment.