Jane Smiley was born in LA, grew up in St Louis and studied at Vassar and Iowa. She won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award in 1992 for ‘A Thousand Acres’.

‘Smiley’s achievement is to communiate so successfully the failure of communication. She has anatomised a network of relationships, focusing with almost impossible subtlety on the gaps between people.’Lesley Glaister, The Times‘Entirely gripping… This book is so alive in its detail that you can practically smell the tack and the straw and hear the animals shifting in their stalls. Jane Smiley’s unobtrusive prose is very good at evoking the bleakness of the heart, but it can also illuminate moments almost beyond articulacy.’Anita Mason, Independent on Sunday