‘Capable of subtlety and wisdom’ … Jane Smiley. Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Observer New Review

Some Luck by Jane Smiley is “the first novel in a projected trilogy about Iowa farm people and their descendants”, wrote Paul Elie in a review for the New York Timesthat was very polite but less than fulsome: “Smiley is so commanding as a novelist and critic that you feel she must have very definite reasons for telling these stories the way she does. She knows these people, no question … But, strangely, her ease with the material makes it feel less than original or necessary.” “If you like thrills and surprises or literary innovation in the mould of an Ali Smithnovel or even Martin Amisat his best, then this formally straightforward linear narrative may not be for you,” decided Louise Jury in the Independent, who couldn’t ever get “really excited” by the novel. “But fans of big-cast family sagas with love and death and the world at large impinging only lightly – but tellingly – on events will love Some Luck .” Lucy Hughes-Hallett ’s notice in the Times had a more positive spin: “Smiley’s prose is as unpretentious as her characters’ thoughts, but like them, capable of subtlety and wisdom. Her narrative structure – the year-by-year chronicle, the evenhanded distribution of attention – is a strong, infinitely pliable, framework. This a quietly written book, nothing flash about it, but it takes on the big subjects – from love to mortality – and meets them with steady strength.”

Not My Father’s Son: A Family Memoir by actor Alan Cumming deals with the violence meted out to him as a child by Alex Cumming, his father. Helen Davies in the Sunday Times described it as “powerful … heart-breaking and brave … a thoroughly gripping read, one that keeps its biggest revelation until the very end”. Jeffery Taylor in the Expressfelt it to be “a brave book, airing fundamental agonies of the human condition with as light a touch as is perhaps possible”. But Andrew Billen in the Times wasn’t so sure about “a book whose prose never quite springs free of the psychobabbly conventions of celebrity memoir … Cumming, as they say in television documentaries, is on a ‘journey’, and its destination is neither his father nor grandfather, but the ever-fascinating Alan himself”.