A Thousand Acres

A Thousand Acres is a novel by the American writer Jane Smiley, published in 1991. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award that year and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992.

The book is a modern retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, set on a family farm of a thousand acres in Iowa. Larry Cook is an ageing farmer who decides to incorporate the land and hand joint ownership to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose and Caroline; when Caroline objects, she is removed from the agreement, and the family that had seemed to be managing begins to come apart. The story is told by Ginny, the eldest, who has spent her life being agreeable, and what she reveals as the quarrel develops is a history of the household that none of the sisters has been able to say out loud. Smiley keeps the scale of the farm and the work of it in view throughout, so that the legal argument and the land itself are part of the same story.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1997 and later became an opera.