Description: This riveting novel from a Pulitzer Prize winner traverses the intimate landscape of one woman's life, from the 1880s to World War II.
Review Quotes: "Masterly.... [A] precise, compelling depiction of a singular woman." --The New Yorker
"Extraordinarily powerful.... It's not often that a work as exceptional as this comes along in contemporary American letters." --The Washington Post "Smiley's best novel yet.... [A] heartbreaking, bitter, and gorgeous story." --The Atlantic Monthly "Remarkable.... With its quietly accruing power, [Private Life is] the kind of book that puts the lie to those who claim that great novelists produce their best work early and spend the rest of their lives gilding the lily." --Chicago Tribune"Has a Jamesian twist of the unforeseen, but it's achieved with a sureness of hand that's all [Smiley's] own." --The New York Times Book Review
"Smiley's eye is keen, and the book's historical pageant is often mesmerizing and often elegantly composed.... A quiet tragedy." --The Seattle Times
"Private Life, perhaps Jane Smiley's best novel since her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, is so firmly anchored in its historical setting that the past comes to seem like the reader's present." --The Oregonian
"Smiley tells her story precisely.... Private Life has a stunning specificity of detail.... Husband and wife are three-dimensional, alive and memorable in the way characters in fiction and people in biographies so rarely are." --The Miami Herald
"Brilliant.... A story of immense originality and insight.... It is served well by the fascinating era in which it is set, and most of all by Smiley's wit and erudition." --The Philadelphia Inquirer
"A book whose enormous power sneaks up on you.... Unlike so many contemporary novels, which start out sure-footed but eventually lose focus, this novel keeps getting better." --The Newark Star Ledger
"Powerful.... Smiley is a wonderful writer.... [She] creates a convincing, nuanced portrait of a woman's life when women had few options." --San Diego Union-Tribune "Brilliant.... Private Life is a powerful, challenging and, ultimately, fierce work of fiction, a masterpiece of a novel that stands with the best of Smiley's work." --The Guardian (UK) "A fine portrait.... [Private Life] should only enhance Smiley's reputation as one of the most innovative and accomplished writers currently at work." --The Times Literary Supplement (London) "A chilling tale, quietly absorbing." --Bloomberg "Richly detailed.... I read parts of Smiley's novel to my mother and, afterward, we found ourselves wondering about our dead female relatives..... They lived, they sorrowed; maybe now we understand them a little better than before." --Susan Swan, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)