Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack, a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson's non-fiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country. She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for 'her grace and intelligence in writing.' Robinson lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
Radiant and visionary, the fourth Gilead novel explores whether a
minister's prodigal son can be redeemed by love . . . [Marilynne
Robinson is] a writer of magisterial wisdom and skill . . . This
has been Robinson's project: to perceive "this teeming world", as
she puts it, "so steeped in its sins", and all the same to insist
on what is best and loveliest
*Guardian*
Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest writers of our time. In
2008 I concluded my article: "I'm not saying that you're actually
dead if you haven't read Marilynne Robinson, but I honestly
couldn't say you're fully alive." I have not changed my mind
*Sunday Times*
The fourth in Robinson's luminous, profound Gilead series and
perhaps the best yet, a sad story about love, race and midwestern
mores
*Observer*
Each of [Robinson's] novels has celebrated the fact that the
ineffable is inseparable from the quotidian, and rendered the
ineffable, quotidian world back to us, peculiar, luminous and
precise . . . There are passages when Jack's eye glimmers so
clearly on the moment, when his dream logic feels so apt, that the
whole world Robinson has illuminated with such care and attention
reappears, and we are returned to the prophetic everyday
*Atlantic*
Marilynne Robinson's novel has some of the beats of a romantic
comedy. The principals are charismatic, their conversation sparky.
Jack can be read as a stand-alone, but the book gains much from
what many readers will bring to it of their knowledge of its
central character from his appearances in the trilogy of novels
that preceded this one. Every time Robinson tells this story, it is
both a better story and truer
*Telegraph*
If your soul isn't stirred by a novel about Jack, chances are you
haven't signed up to the doctrine of Marilynne Robinson, one of
America's defining writers . . . Robinson's writing is numinous but
never alienating to secular readers, because the issues she tackles
are universal, with complicated parent-child dynamics a
favourite
*The i*
It could be said that the attempt to understand how things are is
at the heart of Robinson's remarkable body of work. Jack fits
beautifully into the subtle weave of Robinson's Gilead books; that
said, it could perfectly well be read on its own
*Financial Times*
It is an immensely satisfying and bittersweet end to an astonishing
series. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these four books
taken as a whole is the whole-hearted commitment to the novel as a
moral endeavour. They are beautiful, and they are true
*Scotsman*
This is a sunnier book than anyone might have expected, an unlikely
love story, both funny and sublime: we see two souls awakening to
love in that down-to-earth yet transcendent vein that is Robinson's
special hallmark
*Literary Review*
In Gilead, the first volume, the Rev. John Ames writes that 'a good
sermon is one side of a passionate conversation,' and Ms.
Robinson's novels work that way, too, replying to one another,
querying, clarifying or rebutting, but always sustaining a dialogue
that feels as grand and as inexhaustible as the mysteries they
explore . . . These novels honor creation by affording us something
we only occasionally find in the vastness of existence: a glimpse
of eternity, such as it is
*Wall Street Journal*
Jack Boughton has been present, even when he was painfully absent,
throughout Robinson's profound saga and now he steps forward to
illuminate the hidden facets of his peripatetic life of lies,
thievery, bad luck and dangerous love. Robinson's latest glorious
work of metaphysical and moral inquiry, nuanced feelings, intricate
imagination and exquisite sensuousness begins at night inside the
locked gates of a St. Louis cemetery where Jack, an alcoholic,
sarcastic and self-loathing white man living rough, encounters the
woman he loves, Della Miles, who is a disciplined, poetry-loving,
Black and a devoted high school history teacher . . . Myriad
manifestations of pain are evoked, but here, too, are beauty,
humour, mystery and joy as Robinson holds us rapt with the
exactitude of her perceptions and the exhilaration of her hymnal
cadence, and so gracefully elucidates the complex sorrows and
wonders of life and spirit
*Booklist*
On one, rapturous level, this book is a romance. Nothing can be
wrong, at least for the moment, between these lovers. "And then
they embraced, and what an embrace it was, as if they two had
survived flood and fire, as if they had solved loneliness." It is a
remarkable fact of Marilynne Robinson's genius that every page or
paragraph of Jack could stand for the whole book
*London Review of Books*
A sometimes tender, sometimes fraught story of interracial love in
a time of trouble . . . The story flows swiftly- and without a hint
of inevitability - as Robinson explores a favorite theme, 'guilt
and grace met together'. An elegantly written proof of the thesis
that love conquers all - but not without considerable pain
*Kirkus (starred review)*
Robinson has won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction. Her latest novel, the fourth in the Gilead series, is the
story of the fraught but life-changing relationship between John
Ames Boughton, a white man who has recently been released from
prison, and Delia Miles, an African American teacher, in 1950s St
Louis
*Good Housekeeping*
Jack - the fourth in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series - follows a
wayward son who absconded from the rigours of his Calvinist home
into a life of petty crime and moral doubt. This is his story: the
hesitant wooing of a black schoolteacher, their blossoming love,
her family's rejection of that love and his settling of their
future. The segregationist background makes for troubled events;
the characters' inner confusions make for tenderness in the
telling. Robinson rewards our high expectations
*New Statesman (Best books of 2020)*
It is the strangest beginning of a romance: a night locked in a
graveyard in St Louis. And so staggeringly complex, ethereal and
witty is the dialogue and interaction between the two principle
players . . . we are with them through every minute of their
blossoming connection. This is the fourth in Marilynne Robinson's
magnificent Gilead series and delves deep into the heart of the
American spirit
*Sainsbury's magazine*
A meditation on human decency and the capacity for redemption
*New York Times*
Can love save a man from perdition? That question, braided with
romance and religion, is at the heart of Marilynne Robinson's new
novel . . . Robinson cradles [Jack's] love for Della with the
tenderness of a gracious creator
*Washington Post*
Not just a meditation on faith and human suffering but a singular
portrait of the divine
*Entertainment Weekly*
Jack is the fourth novel in Robinson's Gilead series, an
intergenerational saga of race, religion, family, and forgiveness
centered on a small Iowa town. But it is not accurate to call it a
sequel or a prequel. Rather, this book and the others - Gilead,
Home, and Lila - are more like the Gospels, telling the same story
four different ways . . . At seventy-six, she is still trying to
convince the rest of us that her habit of looking backward isn't
retrograde but radical, and that this country's history, so often
seen now as the source of our discontents, contains their remedy,
too
*New Yorker*
the rare treat of a new novel from Marilynne Robinson
*Guardian*
I have been hoping for this book for six years, ever since I read
Marilynne Robinson's last novel, Lila. She writes with breathtaking
grace and intelligence and Jack will be the fourth in the now
classic series that began with Gilead. Where to read such a
treasure? Somewhere very quiet where you can savour each word - in
front of the fire, wrapped in the finest blanket
*Sainsbury's magazine*
Feckless, reckless Jack meets pious Della, a black teacher, and the
unlikely pair fall in love. Poetry, God and a playful humour
illuminate their relationship in a world benighted by racial
segregation. Jack is an elegant study of faith and love in troubled
times
*Sunday Express*
Robinson's genius lies her ability to inhabit the voices of her
very different characters so completely; this book is no different,
and I loved it.
*Church Times (Best books of the year)*
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and American National
Humanities Medal comes Jack, an exploration into faith and
pastoralism set in the richly imagined community of Gilead.
Touching on themes of love, racism and religion in post-World War
II small-town America, it's a fraught love story between John and
Della. Praised for being one of Robison's greatest achievements,
it's no wonder this featured in Obama's favourites
*Independent*
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