Jane Smiley

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children. Beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly in the Langdons' story.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the second installment, following Some Luck, of her widely acclaimed, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the journey of a remarkable family with roots in the Iowa heartland into mid-century America. Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating...

The family of Asgeir Gunnarsson, a wealthy Greenlander farmer, struggles to survive personal tragedies, famine, political upheaval, and harsh conditions.

Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven in post-Civil War Missouri when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He's the most famous man their small town has ever produced: a naval officer and a brilliant astronomer, a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe. Margaret's mother calls the match "a piece of luck". But as World War II approaches, Andrew's obsessions take a different, darker turn.

On her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, eighth-grader Abby Lovitt faces the possibility of giving up her beloved colt, Jack, when it comes to light that his dam might have been stolen.

Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt grows up on her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, learning to train the horses her father sells and trying to reconcile her strict religious upbringing with her own ideas about life.

From the author of A Thousand Acres comes a suspense thriller. A woman finds two people murdered in the apartment her bestfriend shared with one of the victims. The list of people with duplicate keys is two pages long . . . and includes people no one knows.

In 1960s California, eighth-grader Abby Lovitt has trouble with True Blue, the newest horse on her family's ranch, a beautiful dappled gray who is so often spooked, Abby wonders if he is haunted by the ghost of his deceased former owner.

Soon after her yearling, Jack, begins working with professional trainers at a nearby ranch, Abby Lovitt takes responsibility for a very large, very smart, and very curious retired racehorse named Gee Whiz.

When Ellen meets Ned, a beautiful colt who hurt his leg on his way to becoming a racehorse, she becomes determined to behave at school and at home so she can have more time at the ranch.