A New York Times bestseller Named a Best Book of 2020 by the Australian Book Review, AV Club, Books-a-Million, Electric Literature, Esquire, the Financial Times, Good Housekeeping (UK), The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Literary Hub, the New Statesman, the New York Public Library, NPR, the Star Tribune, and TIME Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the latest novel in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction Marilynne Robinson’s mythical world of Gilead, Iowa—the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack—and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson’s fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, and his romance with Della Miles, a high school teacher who is also the child of a preacher. Their deeply felt, tormented, star-crossed interracial romance resonates with all the paradoxes of American life, then and now. Robinson’s Gilead novels, which have won one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Critics Circle Awards, are a vital contribution to contemporary American literature and a revelation of our national character and humanity.
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Gilead
5 books in catalog
Profound explorations of faith, family, and spiritual transcendence in small-town American life define the fictional universe of the Gilead series, starting with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has built a celebrated body of work through quiet, deeply meditative prose that examines moral accountability, memory, and grace in everyday human existence.
Born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and a PhD from the University of Washington. She published her debut novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award and earning a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991, where she mentored generations of writers before her retirement in the spring of 2016. Across her writing career, she has received numerous honours, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, the National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was also named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people.
Robinson's fiction and non-fiction feature luminous, plain-spoken language that balances rigorous intellectual thought with emotional resonance. Deeply informed by Calvinist theology and mainline Protestant traditions, her work uses religion as a framing mechanism to explore moral orientation, community, and human dignity. Her non-fiction works, including Mother Country (1989), The Death of Adam (1998), Absence of Mind (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), and The Givenness of Things (2015), critique modern social thought and examine spiritual inwardness with clarity and ethical commitment.
