Summary

A Thousand Acres is an American re-telling of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear. In the introduction, Virginia “Ginny” Cook is describing her home of Zebulon County, Iowa. The country is flat, except for a small bump in the middle of a T-intersection in a road. From that rise, you could see the farmland of three neighboring farms: the Cooks, the Clarks, and the Ericsons. Everything was fine when Ginny was a child, and she believed the world was simple and easy to understand.

Years later, Ginny learns from Loren Clark his brother Jess is coming home after being gone for thirteen years. Nobody knew where he had been, other than he had escaped the draft by moving to Canada. Ginny meditates on how her younger sister Rose had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and Ginny had been doing the house chores for three homes. She...