Books like Jane Smiley

Warner’s great convent chronicle has the same rare confidence as The Greenlanders: individuals matter, yet the community and the passing centuries matter more. Nuns die, offices change hands, buildings decay, money disappears, and daily necessity keeps history moving. Warner watches all this with an amused, unsentimental omniscience that resembles Smiley’s saga voice without imitating it.

Long cherished as a cult masterpiece and revived by NYRB Classics, the novel turns administration, weather, illness, appetite, and petty resentment into something mysteriously absorbing. Its medieval convent is not a picturesque backdrop but a complete social organism. Few novels make ordinary endurance feel so strange, consequential, and alive.

Bjartur, an Icelandic sheep farmer, has purchased a bleak smallholding and made independence his religion. Every sack of provisions, cup of coffee, sick ewe, unpaid debt, and patch of bad weather becomes a test of that faith. A reader drawn to Smiley’s exact understanding of how land, scarcity, pride, and inherited stories govern human lives will recognize the force of Laxness immediately.

Yet this is no solemn imitation of a saga. Laxness is savagely funny, lyrical, and compassionate even when his characters are most exasperating. Bjartur’s heroic self-conception repeatedly collides with material reality, while the novel asks whether independence can become another form of bondage. Widely regarded as Laxness’s masterpiece, it helps explain why he won the Nobel Prize: its sheep farm expands into an unforgettable argument about freedom, family, and the price of refusing help.

Undset offers the ideal complement to Smiley. Where The Greenlanders often preserves the stern distance of a chronicle, this trilogy moves deep inside one medieval woman’s moral life while retaining the same dense web of kinship, obligation, labor, faith, property, and reputation. Kristin grows up in a world where private desire can alter the fortunes of an entire household, and where belief is neither decoration nor allegory but a daily, demanding reality.

Undset’s medieval Norway feels inhabited down to its food, clothing, journeys, legal customs, and seasonal work, but the novel’s greatness lies in its psychological candor. Kristin is neither modern heroine nor historical specimen; she is passionate, stubborn, perceptive, and capable of deceiving herself. The trilogy helped secure Undset’s Nobel Prize and inspires unusual devotion in its readers. In Tiina Nunnally’s supple translation, it is one of the few historical novels capacious enough to stand beside The Greenlanders rather than merely resemble it.