A great American tragedy written by one of the greatest novelists of our time. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

For generations, Larry Cook's family has worked tirelessly to turn a swampy, inhospitable plot of land into one of the most prosperous farms in Zebulon County, Iowa. Larry himself has dedicated his life to this task, so everyone is surprised when, in the middle of a celebration with neighbors and relatives, he announces the immediate transfer of the property to his daughters. The three heiresses react very differently to the father's announcement, moved by their different personalities and circumstances: Ginny is a woman full of good intentions, although frustrated by her infertility; Rose struggles to regain her strength after undergoing harsh medical treatment; and Caroline works as a lawyer in the city, oblivious to the day-to-day running of the farm. When the latter shows reluctance in the face of her father's strange initiative and the complacency of her sisters, Larry responds by categorically excluding her from the inheritance. This violent outburst is but the first sign of increasingly indecipherable behaviour on the part of the patriarch, whose history of arbitrariness and manipulation begins to worsen, leading to a transformation in the sisters' relationships with their father and among themselves.

In Inherit the Earth, Jane Smiley's unmistakable voice blends with the landscape she describes to address, with tenderness and violence, themes such as attachment, illness, loyalty, dissatisfaction, appearances and the imprint of trauma. This story, which recovers and reinterprets the Shakespearean tragedy of King Lear, transcends the thousand acres of the Cook farm and reveals the conflicts of being a woman – and a wife, sister or daughter – in a rural world overtaken by the arrival of modernity, the aftermath of Vietnam and the yearnings of a generation bewildered by the American dream.