Jack

2022 Longlist

Marilynne Robinson’s mythical world of Gilead, Iowa—the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, 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 national character and humanity.

About the Author/Translator

Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Librarian’s Comments

When another Marilynne Robinson novel enters our human fray, the frisson of genius sets me on course to grip a copy in my hands. Yes, genius. She pierces every carapace we use to cover our uncertainty, our ignorance, our vulnerability. Jack and Della are as real as seatmates on a bus and, as fantastical as just-discovered sea creatures. Hartford Public Library, United States