Golden Age

Smiley closes her century-spanning Langdon family trilogy with genuine ambition — climate change, the Iraq war, agricultural collapse, and American political polarisation all move through this Iowa family's experience across thirty years — and the emotional accumulation of three volumes of investment pays off in the final pages even when the prose stays deliberately plain. The political messaging on climate is urgent enough to occasionally crowd out the characters, and this volume stands poorly alone, but as the conclusion to a seriously undertaken literary project it earns its place. Read the trilogy from the beginning.