Some Luck

Some Luck opens in 1920 on a farm outside Denby, Iowa, where Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just had their first child, a boy named Frank. He will be the eldest of five, and the novel follows the family as the children grow up and the country changes around them. The book is built one year per chapter, running from 1920 into the early 1950s. Jane Smiley lets the small events of farm life sit right beside the large ones. Electricity arrives and begins to power the Langdons' farm. Later, one of the sons volunteers to fight the Nazis. Children we first meet in the cradle become adults, and one of the daughters has a little girl of her own. The Langdons hold to long-standing values and try to hand them down, even as American social and economic life shifts underneath them. Birth and death, passion and betrayal all pass through the household, and the family's story becomes a way of seeing a changing century from the inside. This is the first volume of a trilogy that spans a hundred years of American life. It was a National Book Award finalist, and Smiley is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres.