Some Luck
A novel
The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: A Family Saga: Book #1
- By: Jane Smiley
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 14 hours 47 minutes
Description
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: a powerful, engrossing new novel—the life and times of a remarkable family over three transformative decades in America.
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart.
Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears.
Some Luck delivers on everything we look for in a work of fiction. Taking us through cycles of births and deaths, passions and betrayals, among characters we come to know inside and out, it is a tour de force that stands wholly on its own. But it is also the first part of a dazzling epic trilogy—a literary adventure that will span a century in America: an astonishing feat of storytelling by a beloved writer at the height of her powers.
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The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: A Family Saga Series

Some Luck
By: Jane Smiley
Narrated by: Lorelei King
Length: 14 hours 47 minutes
Abridged: No
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: a powerful, engrossing new novel—the life and times of a remarkable family over three transformative decades in America.
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different... Read more »

Early Warning
By: Jane Smiley
Narrated by: Lorelei King
Length: 18 hours 11 minutes
Abridged: No
From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the second installment, following Some Luck, of her widely acclaimed, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the journey of a remarkable family with roots in the Iowa heartland into mid-century America
Early Warning opens in 1953 with the Langdon family at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch, Walter, who... Read more »

Golden Age
By: Jane Smiley
Narrated by: Lorelei King
Length: 17 hours 35 minutes
Abridged: No
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: the much-anticipated final volume, following Some Luck and Early Warning, of her acclaimed American trilogy—a richly absorbing new novel that brings the remarkable Langdon family into our present times and beyond
A lot can happen in one hundred years, as Jane Smiley shows to dazzling effect in her Last... Read more »