Berk Worms 2026 - Family Saga

Welcome to our Berk Worms 🐛 book club. Each month we all aim to read the same book from a particular genre and then meet to discuss it. We also then talk about other books we are reading and sometimes exchange books with one another. All are welcome!

Our book for discussion in November is a Family Saga and Pulitzer Prize winning novel (1992) entitled A Thousand Acres, written by Jane Smiley. This novel was first published in 1991 when it also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The novel runs at approximately 370 pages, depending on the edition you read.

About the novel for discussion:

Larry Cook’s farm is the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa, and a tribute to his hard work and single-mindedness. Proud and possessive, his sudden decision to retire and hand over the farm to his three daughters, is disarmingly uncharacteristic.

Larry Cook decides to incorporate his farm, handing complete and joint ownership to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. Ginny and Rose, the two eldest, are startled yet eager to accept, but Caroline, the youngest daughter, has misgivings. Immediately, her father cuts her out. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions.

In A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley transposes the King Lear story to the modern day, and in so doing at once illuminates Shakespeare’s original and subtly transforms it.

Critical views:

‘A Thousand Acres is a strong, gnarled shocker of a novel… superb. Its success is down to Smiley’s ambitious gusto, her intuitive handling of the relationship between character and landscape, and her willingness to haul genuine moral freight across the panorama she has so expertly painted.’ Sunday Times

‘Epic fiction of the very highest order, naturalistic , penetrating and wholly absorbing.’ Literary Review

Reading Ahead:

December is our Christmas 🎄 meal where we reflect on our year of books and choose our genres for 2027. We will also be reading a war novel called Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh

January 2027: we are reading a book by a local author and have chosen that author to be Graham Greene. In our November meeting we will choose which of his books to all read and discuss in January.

Happy reading, 🐛Cazza