In At Paradise Gate, Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Jane Smiley paints with searing accuracy a portrait of a marriage at breaking point and one family's struggle for survival.
While seventy-seven-year-old Ike Robison is dying in his bedroom upstairs, his wife, Anna, must defend all that they have built together through-out their lengthy marriage as their house is invaded by their three interfering - albeit loving - middle-aged daughters and their twenty-three year old grand-daughter, Christine.
Set over a three-day period of family crisis, Anna reflects over all that has happened, and all that is still left to come, in this compelling and gracefully wrought depiction of a marriage. Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, as well as five works of nonfiction and a series of books for young adults. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2006 she received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her novel, Private Life, was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. She lives in northern California. Jane Smiley explores the tumultuous marriage of Ike and Anna Robison over a three-day period of family crisis.
