Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, as well as five works of nonfiction and a series of books for young adults. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2006 she received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her novel, Private Life, was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. She lives in northern California.

Jane Smiley writes with such perception about the emotional perversities that assail the human heart that she manages to convince us utterly of her characters' actions. With this volume she ratifies her claim as one of her generations most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love, its pleasures and its frightening hazards