Some Luck
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Lorelei King
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By:
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Jane Smiley
About this listen
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: a powerful, engrossing new novel - the life and times of a remarkable family over three transformative decades in America.
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart.
Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: One moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears.
Some Luck delivers on everything we look for in a work of fiction. Taking us through cycles of births and deaths, passions and betrayals, among characters we come to know inside and out, it is a tour de force that stands wholly on its own. But it is also the first part of a dazzling epic trilogy - a literary adventure that will span a century in America: an astonishing feat of storytelling by a beloved writer at the height of her powers.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2014 Jane Smiley (P)2014 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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Fallen Angels
- By: Patricia Hickman
- Narrated by: John McDonough
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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During the Great Depression, Jeb Nubey is running from the law when he meets three abandoned children. With nowhere else to go the group passes a stormy night in a comforting church. When they are discovered, a case of mistaken identity ensues. It seems the congregation has been waiting for their new pastor, a widower with three kids. Looks like more trouble for Jeb. Yet the chance for a steady job and three squares a day is too good to turn down.
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Touching
- By Christina on 11-11-04
By: Patricia Hickman
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The Jew Store
- A Family Memoir
- By: Stella Suberman
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1920, in small-town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store". That's how Stella Suberman's father's store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee, was known locally. The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.
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Wonderful
- By Susan simpson on 09-04-21
By: Stella Suberman
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Hannah's Dream
- By: Diane Hammond
- Narrated by: Laura Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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For 41 years, Samson Brown has been caring for Hannah, the lone elephant at the down-at-the-heels Max L. Biedelman Zoo. Having vowed not to retire until an equally loving and devoted caretaker is found to replace him, Sam rejoices when smart, compassionate Neva Wilson is hired as the new elephant keeper. But Neva quickly discovers what Sam already knows: that despite their loving care, Hannah is isolated from other elephants and her feet are nearly ruined from standing on hard concrete all day.
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excellent narration, enjoyable story
- By Elizabeth on 05-11-13
By: Diane Hammond
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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The Magic of Ordinary Days
- A Novel
- By: Ann Howard Creel
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Olivia Dunne, a studious minister's daughter who dreams of being an archaeologist, never thought that the drama of World War II would affect her quiet life in Denver. An exhilarating flirtation reshapes her life, though, and she finds herself banished to a rural Colorado outpost, married to a man she hardly knows. Overwhelmed by loneliness, Olivia tentatively tries to establish a new life, finding much-needed friendship and solace in two Japanese American sisters who are living at a nearby internment camp.
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I purchased this audio book not 15 minutes ago...
- By Kim on 09-15-16
By: Ann Howard Creel
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Maude
- By: Donna Mabry
- Narrated by: Shana Gagnon
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1906 I was barely over 14 years old, and it was my wedding day. My older sister, Helen, came to my room, took me by the hand, and sat me down on the bed. She said, "You've always been a good girl, Maude, and done what I told you. Now you're going to be a married woman, and he will be the head of the house. When you go home tonight after your party, no matter what he wants to do to you, you have to let him do it. Do you understand?"
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Narration made listening almost unbearable
- By Sandra on 01-07-16
By: Donna Mabry
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She Got Up Off the Couch
- By: Haven Kimmel
- Narrated by: Haven Kimmel
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When we last saw Zippy, she was oblivious to the storm that was brewing in her home. Her mother, Delonda, had literally just gotten up off the couch and ridden her rickety bicycle down the road. Her dad was off somewhere, gambling or "working." And Zippy was lost in her own fabulous world of exploring the fringes of Moorland, Indiana.
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Great fun !!
- By Kim on 04-20-11
By: Haven Kimmel
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Homesick
- My Own Story
- By: Jean Fritz
- Narrated by: Jean Fritz
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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This heartwarming fictionalized autobiography tells the story of what it is like for a little girl to be growing up in an unfamiliar place. While other girls her age were enjoying childhood in America, Jean Fritz was in China in the midst of political unrest. During this time, foreigners were becoming more and more unpopular, and evacuation at a moment’s notice was imminent. Although Jean appreciated the beauty of China - the mountains, the countryside, the sea - she knew she belonged in America and longed to make her home there.
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Great book!
- By R. SEVERSON on 10-19-18
By: Jean Fritz
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Wolf Hollow
- By: Lauren Wolk
- Narrated by: Emily Rankin
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Despite growing up in the shadows cast by two world wars, Annabelle has lived a mostly quiet, steady life in her small Pennsylvania town. Until the day new student Betty Glengarry walks into her class. Betty quickly reveals herself to be cruel and manipulative, and though her bullying seems isolated at first, it quickly escalate. Toby, a reclusive World War I veteran, soon becomes the target of her attacks. While others have always seen Toby’s strangeness, Annabelle knows only kindness.
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Amazing Book...not just for YA
- By Raelene Vautrin on 11-29-17
By: Lauren Wolk
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What listeners say about Some Luck
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jacque
- 05-03-15
The ultimate historical novel set in America.
A bit slow at the beginning, I still loved this book. The story encompasses a familiar timeline - the historical period in which the people I love lived their lives. I particularly treasured the detail about daily tasks that technology has erased from our lives.
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- Joe Kraus
- 12-12-15
More Effort than Inspiration
How could the performance have been better?
Lorelei King had a tendency here really to inhabit the children she was voicing. This takes far too long to develop characters who feel as if they have history and substance in any case, and that move exacerbated the novel's flaws.
Any additional comments?
I like to think of narrative as a technology, or a series of technologies. Part of what makes something like The Iliad so compelling is that, in addition to the power (and strangeness) of the story, we get it in so formal and archaic a way. Something like that is true as we move through the early novels, whether it’s Sterne (whose sometimes brilliant ‘technologies’ of inverted chronology get left behind for more than a century) or Scott and Austen, who set much of the pattern that others will follow. Then we start to get psychological novels, Realistic ones, and Naturalistic ones, before we move into stream-of-consciousness and other Modern technologies.
Anyway, that unintelligible prologue aside, what strikes me about Some Luck is that it’s a novel written in a now long-discarded technology. The gimmick here is that each chapter of the novel tells a different year in the life of a large (and ever-growing) family from Iowa. They grow through the different economic times, waxing and waning in fortune along with the country at large.
It’s a hugely ambitious project, an attempt to tell more or less the history of the last century from a distinct what-became-of-the-farm-family perspective. I admire that ambition, and – after a long while – come to enjoy some of what it relates. Smiley is a strong historical fiction writer, and she weaves in all sorts of arcane information, whether the nature of commodity prices in the middle 1930s or the advances in the manufacture of gun powder on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1940s.
Such ambition is hard-wired into this narrative technology, though, and we know this because an entire generation of writers attempted experiments in it. John Dos Passos was doing something that I find more successful and compelling (read Manhattan Transfer if you aren’t familiar with it) but a host of people in his wake wrote more mainstream, less experimental work. I think in particular of James Farrell, Meyer Levin, and the later Theodore Dreiser, but I’m sure there were others in what I think of as a kind of “Soviet Realism” school of American literature.
One consequence of the form is that we never quite get central characters. The “hero” instead is “the people” in one form or another. It’s an interesting effect, but I find it limited and, in the end, fairly spent. Smiley has some good anecdotes here, and she has the outlines of characters who might be interesting if they were developed, but she never dwells on anyone or anything long enough for it to take on the substance I look for in literature. This is a theory of quantity over quality, and the result is a kind of layering; the novel works by accretion, by adding new characters all the time and by relying on the course of history to move action forward.
By the end, there are elements to admire, but I don’t see how this could ever have been taken seriously for the National Book Award. I’d have abandoned it after 50 pages (and likely would have if I weren’t listening to it as an audiobook) except for the fact that I know Smiley to be one of our serious writers and because it was so tedious in the early going that I figured I had to be missing something of her project.
What I was missing, I think, is precisely this idea of her experimenting with narrative technology. But I say as well that it’s been done before – just as well, if not better, in the 1920s and 1930s – and I’m much more interested in seeing how other people have moved forward with the narrative technological potential that Dos Passos showed: with the decentered but deeply drawn characters of some of our best contemporary novelists like Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, Eleanor Catton, and Richard Flanagan. Those writers are doing some of the best work I know, exploring the way deeply developed characters comprise larger communities of people, become collective heroes in complicated contexts; this, instead, feels like nostalgia, like a kind of dead end.
Some of the sequences here are solid – and there’s something to be said for the way the entire apparatus keeps moving forward. I like a lot of the farm-centered narrative, and I like the World War II sequences, but the Cold War subplot seems amateurish at best, and there are long stretches interrupting some of the experiences of characters we were made to care about earlier. In the end, I’m afraid, this seems more notable for its effort than for either its craft or its insight.
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2 people found this helpful
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- KD Stinkypaws
- 09-05-15
Beautiful story
Well written and narrated. I thought it was a little slow and was going to be boring in the beginning but found myself continuously wanting to read more and falling in love with the book. I can't wait to read more!
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- kamf
- 05-11-16
Great narrator & great story!
Great historical look at farm life in the 20's and 30's. Great characters and very descriptive details.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Placeholder
- 08-01-15
Great piece of Americana
The story of a family from the heart land against the background of US history.
The narrator's straight forward delivery was complimenting to be the story.
A real American novel.
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- carlos montoya
- 08-15-22
Never understood it
Even though I liked the details and the writing, I failed to understand what the book was about. Walter? Frankie?
A trilogy? It’s a nope for me.
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Overall
- Annette Wooden
- 05-06-15
Some Luck - Somewhat enjoyable
Nothing happens except their lives. Farm life described in detail - almost daily but still an enjoyable book once you understand nothing is going to happen.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Johnny Kibler
- 10-01-18
Kind of a bore
I just couldn’t get into the characterizations or the story. I usually like Jane Smiley but I am safe from a trilogy.
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1 person found this helpful
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- T. Gardiner
- 04-09-15
Engaging story
Narrator was expressive and easy to listen. I enjoyed the story so much that I listened to the book twice.
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- PK 444
- 02-09-16
Sing-songy reading
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I can't recommend it because I couldn't bear the reader's style after 15 minutes.
What could Jane Smiley have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
Use a better reader.
What didn’t you like about Lorelei King’s performance?
She reads it like a fairy tale: sing-songy, as if for children. There's a touch of irony in every phrasing and her voice did not settle into a normal tone even once. It was exasperating. And I see she's the reader for the whole trilogy! What a shame.
Any additional comments?
I made the error of not listening to a sample first or I would never have wasted a credit on this.
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