Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres

I'd been saving A Thousand Acres for a while, and it was worth the wait and anticipation. Set in contemporary Iowa - farm country - it deliberately invokes King Lear, but would have stood as a marvellous novel even in its own right. Oddly for a city boy like me, its theme of the relationship between landscape and people resonated, but in fact the whole thing caught at me. There are no tricks or gimmicks to A Thousand Acres - it's a story (about family and other things), populated by characters, in which themes are readily discernible...but it does it so well.