I still don't know how Smiley did it, the voices in <i>A Thousand Acres</i> are so raw and true, right from the first page. It's as if she has channelled them, rather than invented them. It has Biblical sweep – that broad sense of the epic – but Smiley is poignant on the daily-ness of life, cooking, cleaning and the way one sister feels when she finds she can't have children .
Independent
It’s been almost 25 years since Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for <i>A Thousand Acres</i>. With the <i>Last One Hundred Years</i> trilogy, she surely confirms her place alongside Roth, Updike and Bellow as one of the truly great chroniclers of 20th-century American life.
Guardian