An American classic from the author of the Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres.

The kind of book today’s novel readers dream of – that elusive, seemingly impossible thing: a totally fresh, literary, accessible, involving modern twentieth-century nineteenth-century epic

There is no American author – male or female – that combines commercial and critical success to the degree that Jane Smiley does. If she were a man, that fact would be rather better known (boasted about?) than it currently is.

In Lidie Newton, Jane has created an extraordinary female protagonist, with whom her reader sympathizes utterly and roots for vigorously – she’s a genuinely Great American Character, like Huck Finn or Isobel Archer or Rabbit Angstrom

Smiley takes us to the faultline in the middle of America in the middle of the last century, and shows us how so much of its successes and failures since then were born in those tense, terrifying times

South vs North; Confederacy vs Union; pro-slavers vs abolitionists; puritans vs hedonists; and women vs men – all the great American conflicts are here; all the great fissures that erupted into the worst war the world had then ever seen, the American Civil War