Jane Smiley

Charles Dickens had a life as full of incident as any of those he created in his novels of life in Victorian England. Instead of tracing the events in his life chronologically, Jane Smiley reveals things only as Dickins did - sometimes years after the event. Thus we see him as his contemporaries would have done and get to know him intimately.

On a prospering Iowa farm in the 1970s, wealthy farmer Lawrence Cook announces his intentions to divide the farm among his daughters, setting off a family crisis reminiscent of Shakespeare's 'King Lear'.