Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Golden Age, the concluding volume 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 Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.

I still don't know how Smiley did it, the voices in A Thousand Acres are so raw and true, right from the first page. It's as if she has channelled them, rather than invented them. It has Biblical sweep – that broad sense of the epic – but Smiley is poignant on the daily-ness of life, cooking, cleaning and the way one sister feels when she finds she can't have children .