A Thousand Acres has been on my radar since high school when an English teacher recommended it as a companion to King Lear, as it's loosely based on the play. I saw a really terrific production of Lear this summer at the Stratford Festival, which reminded me to check it out, so finally, over ten years later, I've gotten around to reading it.

Jane Smiley is head of the Iowa Writer's Workshop (arguably the best writing MFA program in the country) and it will probably surprise no one that most of her fiction takes place in the Great Plains. A Thousand Acres is a re-imagining of Lear in a mid-twentieth century farming community, with the family patriarch dividing his very profitable land among his three daughters at the start of the novel. The stand-in for Goneril serves as our narrator, though she is significantly more sympathetic than her literary ancestor. I'm really enjoying it so far, and the Lear connection is obvious enough but doesn't bog things down. Regardless of its source material, it is a very well-constructed novel (and a Pulitzer Prize winner).

If you've made it this far in life without having read Lear, cross that off your list first, and then dive in to A Thousand Acres, which provides a much slower, subtler, feminine perspective on the same story.