At Paradise Gate: A Novel - Softcover

The Des Moines Register A wise and wonderful book, shot through with rare insight.

The Fresno Bee Smiley's sharp insight, the homely use of details of family life, and the mysteries of marriage set this book apart....One to re-read with appreciation and pleasure.

Library Journal Studded with sensuous descriptive passages and marked with slivers of insight -- a treat for senses and intellect alike. For Smiley, another quite remarkable effort.

Kirkus Reviews Complex domestic tensions...honest, moving, quietly splendid.

In this brilliant novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author Jane Smiley delves into the domestic drama of the Robison family. While seventy-seven-year-old Ike Robison is dying in his bedroom upstairs, his wife defends the citadel of their marriage against an ill-considered, albeit loving, invasion by their three middle-aged daughters and their twenty-three-year-old granddaughter. Amply fulfilling the expectations raised by Smiley's other celebrated works, "At Paradise Gate" is a compelling, gracefully wrought portrait of intergenerational strife and family survival.