Jane Smiley Books in Order

This hefty anthology gathers many of the classic medieval Icelandic family sagas in modern translation, tracing settlers, feuds, voyages, and everyday life in the North Atlantic world that later inspired Smiley’s own fiction about Greenland and Iceland.

On an Illinois horse farm, driven trainer Kate Karlsen is determined to turn her four children into the champion riders she never became. As endless chores and rigid rules dominate their lives, the family’s unspoken resentments build toward devastating consequences.

Over the final days of Ike Robison’s life, his wife Anna and their three adult daughters crowd into the family house, arguing about money, care, and old grievances. The novel stays close to one bedroom and living room as a whole marriage is reexamined.

Alice Ellis, a recent divorcée from the Midwest, leans on a tight New York circle built around a struggling rock band. When she discovers two bandmates shot dead in their shared apartment, the mystery of who holds a duplicate key unravels hidden tensions and betrayals.

In this nonfiction portrait of the Catskill Mountains, Smiley visits potters, weavers, furniture makers, and other artisans who chose craft as a way of life. Their conversations reveal how place, habit, and handwork shape both the objects they make and the communities they live in.

This collection pairs sharply observed stories with the title novella about a dentist who suspects his wife is in love with someone else. As family routines wobble, Smiley traces how middle aged couples absorb, evade, or finally face the knowledge that love has shifted.

A historical epic set among Norse farmers in fourteenth century Greenland, this novel follows Gunnar, his sister Margret, and their kin as harsh weather, rigid beliefs, and failing trade slowly squeeze a remote colony toward isolation, superstition, and collapse.

Two linked novellas explore how one decision can echo through a family for decades. In 'Ordinary Love,' a mother revisits the affair that shattered her marriage and her children’s trust; in 'Good Will,' a self sufficient farmer slowly sees what his chosen simplicity has cost his son.

In this Pulitzer winning novel, a prosperous Iowa farmer decides to hand his thousand acre spread to his three daughters, setting off a slow burn of jealousy, buried trauma, and legal battles. Told by the eldest, Ginny, it recasts Shakespeare's King Lear as an intimate midwestern tragedy.

Set at a big Midwestern agricultural university nicknamed Moo U, this campus novel weaves dozens of faculty, students, and administrators into a darkly comic story about funding cuts, secret experiments, office politics, and the uneasy overlap between academic ideals and agribusiness money.

This historical adventure follows twenty year old Lidie Harkness from quiet Quincy, Illinois, into the violent chaos of 1850s Kansas Territory. Married to an abolitionist, she confronts raids, divided loyalties, and her own courage as the fight over slavery turns personal.

Spanning two racing seasons, this big novel roams through barns, tracks, and owners' boxes in American Thoroughbred racing. Trainers, gamblers, breeders, and even the horses themselves take turns at center stage, revealing how luck, money, and temperament shape life on and off the track.

In this brief literary biography, Smiley recounts the life of Charles Dickens while reading closely through his major novels. She links his hard childhood, fame, financial worries, and complicated marriage to the exuberant plots, crowded casts, and social concerns that still draw readers to his work.

In 1982 New Jersey, easygoing real estate agent Joe Stratford is drawn into ever riskier deals when a charismatic former IRS man arrives promising quick riches. As the boom of the Reagan era gathers speed, Joe has to decide how much of his own good faith he is willing to spend.

Part memoir, part meditation, this nonfiction book follows Smiley’s life with horses, from backyard barns to major racetracks. Through training mishaps, quirky animals, and long days at the track, she thinks aloud about money, love, risk, and what it means to truly know another creature.

After a stalled manuscript left her doubting her work, Smiley set out to read one hundred novels and think about how the form works. The result blends literary history, writing advice, and brief, opinionated readings of books from The Tale of Genji to contemporary fiction.

During the tense opening days of the Iraq war, a film director, his new partner, and a shifting cast of friends, exes, and relatives hole up in a Hollywood Hills house. Over ten languid days they trade stories about sex, art, fame, and politics, trying to locate their own moral footing.

Abby Lovitt has been riding for as long as she can remember, but her father insists every gelding is named George and every mare Jewel, because the horses are meant to be sold. When one difficult horse refuses to settle, Abby is forced to question the rules that govern both barn and family.

Eighth grader Abby juggles school, church, and chores on her family’s California ranch while training a talented colt named Jack. A letter from a private investigator hints that Jack’s dam may have been stolen, and Abby must face the possibility that the horse she loves belongs to someone else.

Margaret Mayfield marries naval officer and self styled genius Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early at the turn of the twentieth century, hoping for stability and purpose. As his obsessions deepen and American history rolls from the Spanish American War through World War II, she slowly reckons with how small and damaging her marriage has become.

This narrative biography tells the story of physicist John Vincent Atanasoff and the little known machine he built in the 1940s, arguing for his place in the birth of electronic digital computing and tracing how his ideas resurfaced in later, more famous designs.

When Abby brings home True Blue, a striking gray horse whose owner died in a car accident, she feels as if she has finally met her dream horse. But Blue seems spooked by things no one else can see, and Abby begins to suspect that grief and ghosts may be sharing the arena with her.

Sent to ride an expensive horse named Pie in the Sky at a high level clinic, Abby finds herself away from home, surrounded by ambitious riders and demanding trainers. As she juggles new friends, old loyalties, and worries about her beloved True Blue, her ideas about horses and success start to shift.

Abby is fascinated by Gee Whiz, a tall, curious horse who seems eager to see more of the world. With her brother facing a draft notice and friends leaving for school, opportunities and losses pile up, and Abby has to decide when to hold on to her horses and when to let them go.

This travel anthology collects stories of naive arrivals and hard won wisdom from journeys gone sideways. Eggers and other contributors describe being out of their depth in unfamiliar cultures, finding both humility and humor in the mistakes travelers inevitably make.

Beginning in 1920 on an Iowa farm, this first volume of the Last Hundred Years trilogy follows Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their children one year at a time. Births, droughts, wars, and quiet domestic dramas accumulate into a rich portrait of midwestern family life through the early 1950s.

Picking up where Some Luck leaves off, Early Warning traces the Langdon children into adulthood from the 1950s through the Cold War decades. As they scatter to suburbs, cities, and military bases, the novel tracks shifting ideas about work, marriage, politics, and what it means to leave the farm behind.

The final Langdon novel carries the sprawling family into the era of deregulation, global finance, and the war on terror. Children and grandchildren wrestle with inherited land, political power, climate anxiety, and personal disappointments, testing how much of a family’s character can survive rapid change.

First published in The Age of Grief and later released as a digital short story, this piece follows a beautiful, emotionally distant young poet whose visit from an old college friend and his wife exposes fault lines in all three lives and tests how far loyalty can bend.

After a long, happy day at the beach, young Lucy wakes in the night to find her bedroom transformed by moonlight and shadows. As she tiptoes through the quiet house, counting yawns along the way, the picture book gently walks small readers back toward sleep.

In the first Ellen and Ned book, fourth grader Ellen starts lessons with teen trainer Abby Lovitt and meets Ned, a retired racehorse she feels she can almost talk to. At the same time she is processing her own adoption and the prospect of a new baby joining the family.

This short, speculative tale imagines a future valley where animals run the world and the remaining humans live under strict rules. A horse named High Note works in Human Control and finds her certainty shaken by one small, defiant woman she nicknames Plucky.

This slim volume gathers four essays, each by a different contemporary writer, reflecting on one of Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. Together they explore how reading Little Women shaped their ideas about ambition, love, grief, and growing up.

In the second Ellen and Ned story, Ellen cannot stop thinking about Ned, even as she learns to jump on a steady pony named Hot Potato and adjusts to life with a new baby sister. Secrets among friends and parents alike force her to decide who deserves the truth.

After a stall door is left open, Paras, a curious racehorse, wanders from a Paris track into the city streets and finds an unlikely circle of animal friends and one lonely boy. This modern fable follows their makeshift family through a winter of small adventures and quiet acts of care.

Now living in a new town and finally the owner of her own horse, Tater, Ellen pushes herself as a rider while navigating fresh friendships at the barn. A daring boy named Da and the continued pull of Ned complicate her sense of who she is in and out of the saddle.

In 1850s Monterey, young widow Eliza Ripple supports herself by working in a brothel and trying to stay safe. When women in town begin turning up murdered and the authorities seem indifferent, she and her friend Jean borrow methods from Edgar Allan Poe to hunt a killer on their own.

This collection of essays and one short story gathers Smiley’s reflections on classic books, American culture, and the act of reading itself. Moving from Little Women to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and beyond, she asks how literature shapes what we know and how we think about freedom.

Set across several decades, Lucky follows Jodie Rattler, a folk singer who rises from a working class childhood in St Louis to stages around the world. As she tours, records, and weathers shifting musical fashions, Jodie keeps circling questions about art, family, and what it really means to feel lucky.